At last week's bilateral meeting with the U.S., Chinese President Xi Jinping said agriculture is a field where both countries would "expand mutually beneficial cooperation." However, it has not been so mutually beneficial to date. Shabenomics Shinzö Abe was just elected by the ruling LDP party to a second, three-year term as prime minister of Japan. He announced that his goal in the next term is to boost Japan's economic output 22 percent by 2020. That will require some inflation, which has thus far proven elusive. He also wants to increase the Japanese birth rate as well as institutionalize child and elder care. The latter would formalize into economic output data services that are already performed by family members. Most controver...
What You Need to Know Today: After a period of limited activity, USDA reported a sizeable 613 KMT in soybean export sales, including 330 KMT to China and 283 KMT to unknown destinations, potentially also China. The purchases represent a meaningful pickup in demand and bring China closer to ful...
Key Takeaways: Consumer spending is a key driver of the U.S. economy, and the latest retail sales data indicate that spending remains robust despite inflation. In September, total retail and food service sales rose more than 6 percent year-over-year, with food service spending up 7 percent and...
The Trump import plan for 300,000 MT of beef supplies used for ground beef, i.e., lean trim, from September through November has, according to Secretary Brooke Rollins, brought some relief to beef prices. The Executive Order states that the Secretary of Agriculture will analyze and review the m...
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.