Friend-shoring or moving supply chains closer to being between like-minded nations doesn’t seem like an agriculture issue but it could become one. That is because the sector is increasingly being treated like a strategic asset, and it faces differentiated production standards as regulations begin to mimic industrial approaches for sustainability. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said this week that agriculture should be a part of CFIUS, which would impose geopolitical level restrictions on the sector. In the increasingly bipolar world, Japan, the U.S., and the EU are the most like-minded in the West-based grouping of nations. They comprise 42 percent of global GDP. With about 15 percent of global GDP, China is the lead of the competing blo...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.