Forest for the Trees Malaysia is threatening to block imports from the EU due to Brussels’ decision to restrict palm oil’s eligibility under the Renewable Energy Directive (RED). Instead, European officials are considering making U.S. soybeans eligible for RED as a carrot in trade negotiations with the Donald. However, consistency would suggest a halt to using any food as an energy source. Ultimately, what bothers Europe is deforestation of wilderness areas in Malaysia and Indonesia to make way for palm kernel production. Southeast Asians see hypocrisy since Western nations denuded their landscape for economic reasons, leaving forested levels pale by comparison to this day. Approximately 5 percent of the U.S. is protected land...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...