World Perspectives

Name Calling One; Name Calling Two; China’s Self-Limitations; Value of Imports; Traitor to the Cause

Name Calling One Slammed by the lower cost of related catfish subspecies imported from Vietnam and China, U.S. catfish farmers have tried various approaches to reduce the competition. They threw AD/CVD duties at the imported fish, they lobbied the government to prevent the imported fish from being called catfish, they disparaged the imported fish by saying it was raised with chemicals and was less safe to eat, and they changed the name of their own prime catfish filets to Delicata. But their (hoped for) final action was to switch the government inspection agencies for both domestic and imported product to USDA from FDA, since the latter was perceived as less stringent.  But alas, five years after USDA inspectors took over the task, t...

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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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