This is a busy week for the agricultural policy world. The administration is engaged in trade negotiations with China as well as NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada, and the House is dealing with both the farm bill and the FY 2019 appropriations bill. Chinese Vice Premier Liu He is in Washington, DC with a delegation of trade negotiators this week. While the trade talks are much broader than agriculture, U.S. farm exports to China are a big component of the discussion. Those exports were valued at about $19.6 billion in 2017, and the administration believes they can grow to $50 billion. Currently, China’s $10 billion in soybean purchases represent more than one-half of the total value of exports for that commodity. All other commodity...
What You Need to Know Today: After a period of limited activity, USDA reported a sizeable 613 KMT in soybean export sales, including 330 KMT to China and 283 KMT to unknown destinations, potentially also China. The purchases represent a meaningful pickup in demand and bring China closer to ful...
Key Takeaways: Consumer spending is a key driver of the U.S. economy, and the latest retail sales data indicate that spending remains robust despite inflation. In September, total retail and food service sales rose more than 6 percent year-over-year, with food service spending up 7 percent and...
The Trump import plan for 300,000 MT of beef supplies used for ground beef, i.e., lean trim, from September through November has, according to Secretary Brooke Rollins, brought some relief to beef prices. The Executive Order states that the Secretary of Agriculture will analyze and review the m...
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.