World Perspectives

Future Industry Impacts; Minimum Wage and Farm Labor

Future Industry Impacts The push toward shorter supply chains and plant-based food products will have perverse impacts on the food marketing industry. For example, eating local runs directly counter to the use of geographic indicators, which seeks to protect and promote the sale of food in non-local origins. Similarly, the use of geographic indicators is a protection of traditional monikers for food, which runs counter to the current effort to call plant-based liquids “milk,” or naming non-animal proteins “meat.” The naming of food has historically been malleable, but the current conflicts involve more highly visible market structure than in years past.  Minimum Wage and Farm Labor The current debate over the...

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From WPI Consulting

Forecasting developments in production agriculture

On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.

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