The U.S. and China have reached a trade deal, which includes U.S. beef access to the Chinese market for the first time in almost 14 years. What can be expected?President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping met in Florida in early April to discuss a number of bilateral trade issues and mutual foreign policy concerns. The result was a 100-day plan that included re-opening the Chinese market to U.S. beef for the first time since late 2003. China had announced in September 2016 that it would do so, but no progress had been made on the implementing rules and import protocols. In keeping with the plan from that bilateral meeting, the Trump administration announced last Friday that a broader trade deal has been struck, which involves beef, liqu...
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.