World Perspectives

Holding the Bag; Gauging the Election Outcome

Holding the Bag With the increased focus on sustainability and third-party certification in meeting corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals, growers want to know what they can expect in the future. It is likely that banana growers are the canary in the mine. South American producers complain that fees must be paid to the Rainforest Alliance to certify their production standards at the same time European buyers are driving down the price they pay for bananas. In short, the same European retailers demanding that growers pay the cost of the CSR imprimatur are themselves unwilling to compensate growers for that accomplishment. The sustainability standards are regularly increased, and growers pay $50/hectare for the Rainforest Alliance labe...

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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.

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