The topic of U.S. food aid programs seldom garners a lot of public attention, but it never goes away either. Like the proverbial bad penny, the topic of food aid keeps turning up. Last week an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal prompted us to reminisce about the early days of U.S. food aid under PL 480. In those days, shipments under PL 480 dominated U.S. grain exports, especially so in the case of wheat. There were several years when food aid shipments under PL 480 accounted for the majority of U.S. wheat exports. It is fair to say that from 1965-67 when the Indian sub-continent suffered from severe drought, huge shipments of U.S. grain, primarily wheat, were a major factor in preventing devastating food shortages and widespread fami...
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...
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.