Danger of Corn Dispute Delay At the late March hearing before the Finance Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) pressed USTR Katherine Tai not to delay taking formal action against Mexico for its proposed ban on GMO corn imports. She made no specific commitment and now the earliest date for filing a formal dispute settlement case under the USMCA has come and passed. The agency says it has no imminent plans to file a case. Academics at Ohio State University issued a report declaring confidence the U.S. would win the case should it proceed, but the formal process takes around eight and a half months to complete. This means that any final resolution would occur long after seed companies would need to be switching their production plans t...
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.