Fixing the WTO The 13th Ministerial Conference last month in Abu Dhabi was yet another failure by the WTO. Now Singapore has proposed a retreat to discuss fundamental fixes needed to stop the long string of failures. Ultimately, the structural problems of the WTO involve one country, one vote and the necessity of consensus. Gambia with just 1.4 million people and a $2 billion economy has the same voting power as China with 1.4 billion people and $17.7 trillion in GDP. None of the other Bretton Woods institutions have this flaw. The UN is prejudiced toward the more powerful countries via the Security Council. The bias of the IMF and World Bank is toward economic size and capital contributions. The majority involves poorer countries a...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran agreed to a peace deal on Monday with the deal expected to be signed Friday in Switzerland. The memorandum signed is explicit that Iran will allow 60 days of toll-free transit for all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and President Trump annou...
The U.S. and Iran announced a framework peace deal. Crude oil futures dropped to $83.08, the lowest since early March. The breakthrough comes as President Trump said that if Iran failed to reach a deal, he would order renewed military attacks. An LNG tanker chartered by India’s Petronet c...
Key Takeaways: Vertical farming offers year-round production, reduced water use, and the ability to grow fresh produce closer to consumers. High electricity consumption for lighting and climate control has proven to be the industry's biggest obstacle to profitability. Large upfront investments...
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.