World Perspectives

Cuban Pipedream

Some in the U.S. agriculture community have spent years trying to improve sales to Cuba, which have increased though from a very small base. Now there is even less reason to think they’ll succeed. Their pipedream has been a hungry population of around 11 million people just 60 miles off the American coast. But Cubans are relatively poor and growing more so. The city-state of Singapore has half the population of Cuba but nine times the GDP per capita and buys twice as much American farm products. The government envisions converting to market socialism but is still so redistributive and state controlled that the economy has failed to evolve. Now add to the burdens hurricanes, an earthquake and power blackouts. Its energy imports have plu...

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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.

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