World Perspectives

Pivotal May 10th; Socialist Agriculture; Cost of Diversity

Pivotal May 10th Markets this Friday have two metrics to watch: the WASDE and Donald Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese. His threat to substantially ramp up the trade war with China if there is no deal by Friday initially crashed Wall Street, but it mostly recovered. The FTSE in Europe closed higher, but the Shanghai and Hang Seng markets saw substantially larger losses. The good news is that the U.S.-Chinese trade dispute could end by Friday, but the bad news is that it could get much worse.   Socialist Agriculture U.S. Democrats running for president in 2020 complain about the adverse impact of Mr. Trump’s tariff wars but are hard pressed to say that they prefer to treat China nicer. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-V...

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Mercosur Regional Analysis

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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