New EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan was in Washington this week for a sort of baptism by fire. On top of foreign policy tensions like Iran and security issues like NATO funding, there are economic issues like trade. The U.S. has imposed tariffs on imports from the EU under the WTO Airbus case. They are in the process (deadlines for comments to USTR closed on Monday) of considering higher and additional tariffs, and separately there is the threaten of tariffs on imports from France due to a new digital services tax. The EU is also caught in the triangular cross-fire of U.S. and UK interests in negotiating a free trade deal as the EU negotiates the terms of Brexit. As the former Agriculture Commissioner, Mr. Hogan was well prepa...
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.