World Perspectives

Harvesting Cash from Naiveté

By awakening consumers to the mundanity of the food business, one food critic and his ilk have spawned new Big Ag profits with meaningless but profitable products like non-GMO while growing niche segments like organic to the point that it is about to be relegated to commoditization.Food industry critic Michael Pollan has penned a piece in the New York Times that expresses his political disillusionment, but it also betrays the fault of his arrogance. It is a fitting revelation for anyone cocksure about their viewpoints on public policy to also consider that they may in fact be wrong.Pollan opens the piece by gloating how then-presidential candidate Barack Obama echoed his views about a “broken food system” on the 2008 campaign trail, the pre...

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Trade War Positions

Canadians reacted with understandable revulsion to President Trump’s insults to their nation. In yesterday’s election, they were given two choices: elect Conservative Pierre Poilievre as prime minister who pledged to build a better and stronger nation, or choose Liberal Mark Carney...

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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