China Proposes FTA with Mercosur China's President Wen Jiabao yesterday suggested that China and the countries of the Mercosur bloc consider negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA). Wen made the proposal while he was in Buenos Aires as part of a four-nation swing through the Mercosur area. Wen also has visited or will visit Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, but not Paraguay because it maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan and not China.Agricultural interests in the Mercosur region are likely to be very supportive of an FTA with China, but the region's industrial sector and labor unions probably will strongly oppose it. Both Argentina and Brazil recently have been imposing various import restrictions on manufactured goods to protect their...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.