The U.S. maritime industry needs to start supporting national defense and stop hiding behind it while the WTO needs to educate its poorer members – and Donald Trump. End Jonesing In street slang, “Jones” or “jonesing” can mean an addition and the very small U.S. maritime industry has had a long time addition to the Jones Act, which requires only U.S.-flagged vessels be used in intracoastal commerce. Other WTO members are saying the national security derogation for the policy should not last forever. U.S. consumers and the agricultural trade would agree. Perhaps there should be a study on how much the restriction actually helps U.S. national security – not much. WTO Failure The Uganda representative asked WTO Director General Roberto Aze...
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.