The Trump Administration started a more robust process of conditioning the offer of nonreciprocal import tariff relief to developing countries under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). Now the incoming Biden Administration says it will carefully way trade concessions based on labor practices, environmental protection, and other goals. There is bipartisan support in Congress for stronger conditionality. However, there may be less impact on food and agriculture. First, most reduced tariffs under GSP benefit industrial goods, particularly inputs used by U.S. manufacturers. Second, the U.S. only imports food from some select developing countries. For example, just 2 percent of food imports originate from Sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 10...
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...
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.