Macroeconomic Trends Food Prices in June See Biggest Decline Since November The average cost of food this past June fell by 1.7 percent from a year ago. That amounts to the largest decrease since last November when it declined year-on-year by 2 percent. June’s figures also reverse course from May when food prices inched up by .3 percent from May 2020. Driving the downturn have been pork prices, which contracted by 36.5 percent from where they stood in June 2020. Other food items seeing decreases included fresh vegetables, cooking oil, and dairy products, which ticked down by .1 percent, 7.7 percent, and 2.2 percent, respectively. In contrast, prices for eggs and fresh fruit were up from a year ago by 17.9 percent and 3.1 percent, re...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.