Dispute Settlement Slugfest: Trade lawyers this week find themselves up to their keisters in WTO dispute settlement cases. For too long trade litigation has been avoided for a variety of reasons, including: 1) comity, 2) inadequate economic value being lost relative to cost of litigation, 3) risk of loss and setting precedent, 4) unintended snowballing of trade cases, etc. Argentina has started an avalanche with its policy attempts at manipulating a trade surplus. This prompted challenges from Mexico, the U.S., Japan and the EU. Now Argentina has formalized its countersuits against the U.S. for restrictions on beef and lemons (see WPI 22 August), and against the EU over a Spanish ban on biodiesel imports, and says it wants to file against...
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.