Most reviews of the year 2023 characterize the period as tumultuous, largely due to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, coups in Africa driven by gold mining, plus western tensions with China. Now the outlook for 2024 is being framed as scarier still. The wars and tensions continue but adding to the mayhem will be elections in major democracies such as the U.S., EU and India. Analysis by AgriCensus attributed the 29 percent ($16 billion) decline in commodity trading in 2023 to geopolitical tensions plus weather (El Niño), or what they described as climate change. Could increased geopolitical risks and the threat of a Second Cold War mean even worse commodity declines for 2024? Researchers from USC and Linköping University...
What You Need to Know Today: Iran says its definition of the Strait of Hormuz is now a “vast operation area” that stretches from Jask to Siri Island. The White House said President Trump did not sign a suspension of the TRQs on beef imports but is “finalizing potential...
If the media headlines and Trump critics are to be believed, President Trump is headed to Beijing this Thursday in a weakened position. China is in control, it has the upper hand, and expectations are very low. These are the same critics that argue against overly simplistic zero-sum analyses in...
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.