TPP Deal for Decline: The deal is being done between the U.S. and Japan for an exchange of concessions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations, an exchange of areas where reform will not be complete. Japan will maintain protection of rice and perhaps other ag commodities in exchange for the U.S. keeping tariffs on cars and pickup trucks. This placates two respective and powerful constituencies: Japanese farmers and the U.S. auto workers union. But it is protection both should publicly regret. Japanese rice production has fallen because the government has used supply controls to boost price, but this has caused a shortage of the higher yielding, lower-priced rice that the market demands. Meanwhile, imported trucks and aut...
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...
Key Takeaways: India is excluding sugarcane juice, sugar syrup, and B-heavy molasses from its 2026/27 fuel ethanol procurement program to protect domestic sugar supplies, potentially shifting additional demand toward corn and rice. India’s corn consumption for ethanol has surged from jus...
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.