World Perspectives

EU Studies Trading Houses

As part of its witch hunt for unfair market practices, the EU Parliament’s AGRI Committee requested a study of the major agricultural commodity trading companies and their impacts.  The study may inform populists in the U.S. that also see consolidated industries as inherently harmful, but the bottom line for policymakers is what can they logically do about such concerns. Lawmakers, especially in Europe, should heed this week’s warning by Portuguese Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel who said, "Europe has a cultural tendency to over-regulate, which is naturally a disadvantage. We need balance, it's always a question of balance, and we need to accommodate both [technology development and democratic values and human rights]."Oligopoly: The rep...

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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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