World Perspectives
livestock

Meat and Money

Beef and pork futures prices have been declining due to the likely sharp drop in economic growth. On a cost per calorie basis, beef can be five times as expensive as eggs, and pork can be three times as expensive as wheat bread. On a world-wide basis, beef consumption is more influenced by GDP change than is chicken or pork.  In some countries, poultry is substituted for beef when income declines, and in others the default is pork. Chinese consumers are five times more sensitive to GDP changes and their pork consumption than are Americans. During the Great Recession, global beef consumption dropped for two years in a row, pork consumption declined for one year, and the growth in poultry demand slowed. It is unclear at this juncture ho...

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soy-oilseeds

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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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