TPP Nut-Cracking The political commitment to complete the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations this year brings forward the various tough issues. This has prompted a large, bipartisan group of House legislators to write to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman insisting that agriculture needs an enforcement mechanism for phytosanitary (SPS) issues and not just the simple consultation mechanism suggested thus far. One indicator of how far this demand can be pushed will be the Obama Administration's upcoming decision on the degree of intellectual property protection it will demand in the talks for U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Presumably, higher demands on behalf of pharmaceuticals will expose the inconsistent and weake...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.