While most of the world is narrowly focused on COVID-19, East Africa faces the same prospects for that human disease while also battling the fall army worm and the desert locust. The locust outbreak alone is said to be the worst in 25 years for East Africa and the worst in 70 years for Kenya specifically. Periods of good moisture causes a boom in the region's plant life and concurrently prompts the desert locust to hatch and take advantage of the now abundant food. That includes the staple food crops used by humans. According to the Desert Locust Information Service, 1997 had a locust alert after good rains fell in the southern end of the Red Sea. The region’s maize production was off by less than one million tons. Likewi...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
A federal appeals court paused a USITC ruling against President Trump’s use of Section 122 to impose 10-percent global tariffs. A bipartisan group of 80 House members asked USTR to investigate specialty crop imports from Mexico for unfair trade practices. India notified the WT...
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.