Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson today announced her resignation. She is the second member of the Obama Cabinet to do so; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first. No replacement has been mentioned as yet, but EPA Deputy Administrator Robert Perciasepe will be the agency's temporary head.Jackson's decision to step down coincides with an emerging controversy over her alias e-mail account under the name Richard Windsor -- her dog is named Richard and her former home was in East Windsor Township, New Jersey. EPA has defended the use of the account. It is not an unusual practice for high-level government officials to have personal e-mail accounts because their standard accounts can be accessed publicall...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
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...
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.