Creating change through the use of labeling and taxes is not so simple.The International Association for the Study of Obesity suggests that the solution to obesity is regulating unhealthy foods in the same manner that alcohol and tobacco consumption has been addressed. In other words, create change through the use of labeling and taxes. However, it is not so simple. First, the alcoholic beverage warning label began in 1989 and per capita consumption increased during 1993–2009. Meanwhile, California's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (a.k.a. Prop 65) requires businesses to post warning labels about the presence of cancer-causing chemicals. While that information theoretically benefits people, the largest documented beneficiaries...
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.