Biden Trade Policy The Biden Administration’s approach to trade policy continues to be plodding and cautious. After meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it was announced that TIFA negotiations would be restarted. However, the Prime Minister thinks that the U.S. belongs in the CPTPP and cautioned that the IPEF (still ill-defined) must “be meaningful.” Then there is the separate IPEF negotiations with Taiwan. Taipei was excluded from the IPEF with 14 other countries because it might upset Beijing, whereas somehow an IPEF agreement directly between the U.S. and Taiwan does not? Then there is the obligatory references to trade being worker-centric, good for the environment, the climate and gender eq...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.