“Friend” Shoring WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala warned countries against the fallacy of friend shoring. She posed the questions: who is a friend? and will they be a friend tomorrow? These questions are appropriate to ask when it comes to India. Although a democracy, India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Highly mercantilist, India is the country to opt out of the very modest trade section of the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. The country continues to maintain substantial import barriers even as its trade surplus with the U.S. grows larger each year. Yet companies like Apple and others are rushing to move their production facilities from China to India, which may...
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...
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) enters its mandated six-year review on 1 July. The original intent of the review is outlined in Article 34.7, which obligates members to: Provide recommendations and decide on appropriate actions. Extend the USMCA for another 16 years and meet aga...
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.