When it comes to stoking global economic activity, the 800-pound gorilla rattling some markets is the potential slowdown in China's growth. Late as Usual Rep. Sander Levin (D-Michigan) is an influential trade skeptic who has voiced his opposition to a pending Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill and his intent to amend it. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and others have noted that the TPA provides a special and more robust role for Congress in trade agreement negotiations. Now Rep. Levin is asserting that Congress must insert itself into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks regardless of TPA. He is trying to have his cake and eat it too by denying the executive branch (President Obama) the benefits of TPA while nonetheless t...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.