According to some policymakers, the requirement that aid be sent on U.S.-flagged vessels might be the most important issue.The White House has long made the delivery of U.S. food and humanitarian assistance a priority, proposing to reduce both the U.S. contribution of commodities and the requirement that aid be sent on U.S.-flagged vessels. Both suggested reforms could decrease the cost of administering food aid and are probably correct. Cash could be used to purchase commodities more closely located to aid recipient nations, and the ability to ship on foreign carriers could also reduce shipping costs. The president's latest proposed budget for FY 2015 recommends the use of local procurement near crises, or cash transfers and vouchers...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.