Food has historically been traded based on relative price whereby low-cost producers dominate the marketplace. Border tax advocates now want to add the cost of an externality, greenhouse gas emissions. This change could possibly turn the world on its head. Since meat is criticized for being a major culprit of climate change, it provides a good example of potentially outsized effects from giving more weight to emissions than to price. Based on FAO data on the intensity of emissions by country and meat product, rain forest advocates will be glad to know that Brazil should not be producing and exporting beef, milk (products), lamb, eggs, or pork. But strictly looking at the intensity of CO2 equivalent emissions per kilogram of meat product pr...
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.
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...