News coverage of the nation's fiscal cliff dilemma has become something akin to a game show. Just as an audience roots for contestants, the press is now cheering on the chief negotiators, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, as they decide whether or not to take a deal.Earlier today The New York Times reported that the White House delivered a proposal and "what may be close to a final deal" to Speaker Boehner. Boehner later proposed a backup "Plan B" in case he and the president fail to reach an agreement on a deal. In response, the White House issued a statement rebuffing the idea, saying "the president has put a balanced, reasonable proposal on the table" that compromises with Republicans on revenue and spending. Boehner's Pl...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Pakistan’s smaller wheat farmers have been holding protests to complain about the lack of a support price for wheat and the potential expansion of GMO crop production. They also want the reinstatement of PASSCO, the governme...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
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.