Brazil has the largest fleet of cars converted to use the highest blends of ethanol, and the government is reportedly debating whether to remove duties on imports of the U.S.-sourced fuel. As is usual in many countries, the agriculture ministry opposes such a move, but others in the government see it as a strategic offering toward a larger bilateral trade agreement. The U.S. is already the largest supplier of ethanol to Brazil (see graph below), and when the current 600 million-liter import quota expires at the end of August, the 20 percent duty would still leave American ethanol competitively entering the market. Shipments of biofuel have been a growing market, and the trade war with China has made it more important as an outlet for surpl...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran resumed missile strikes after a brief pause in fighting, raising concerns that the five-month conflict could expand across the Middle East. Jordan intercepted Iranian missiles, Kuwait reported a fatal strike, and drone attacks damaged two natural...
The Senate Agriculture Committee will take up the farm bill next week, and a number of amendments targeting the meat industry are expected to be offered. Two of the most potentially damaging are the Schumer amendment, based on his bill, the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, and mandatory co...
Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, published in 1770, is of a timeless quality. It is a 425-line lament for a disappearing rural world, where prosperous villages give way to larger estates, fewer farmers, and emigration. One passage even follows those leaving for the new colony of Georgia...
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.