World Perspectives

Offer Ownership; False Equivalence

Offer Ownership U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) has urged the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the “Big Four” meat packing companies, suggesting their excessive market power is the reason consumers are being charged high prices for beef. The North American Meat Institute responded by pointing out that, “Cattle producers are earning record profits on the sale of their animals while beef packer margins have been in the red for two years. Meanwhile, concentration in fed cattle slaughter hasn’t changed meaningfully in 30 years.” The Senator should probably talk to his own state’s influential agricultural economist, Bill Wilson at North Dakota State University. Professor Wilson has extensively...

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Middle East Grain Trade Trends

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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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