World Perspectives

Latin American Political Stability

Political instability should be a threat to food security, though that does not appear to be the case in Latin America. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization categorizes Venezuela as very politically unstable, yet its per capita food supply is listed as relatively high, at least as reported by Caracas. Argentina has been politically stable like its food supply, though Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was just convicted of corruption, and then her prosecutor was assaulted this past weekend.  All eyes are now on Peru after President Pedro Castillo’s impeachment last week following a failed coup attempt. Castillo’s policy platform involved a claim to “embrace Marxism,” which historically has been a...

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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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