TPP to the Forefront The Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have reignited the interests of Washington trade lobbyists. It promises to be financially large, ambitious in scope and eventually wider in terms of the number of participating countries. Japan has now secured the endorsement of four current TPP countries for joining the pact and begins talks with the U.S. next month. Plus, add Canada, Mexico and potentially Taiwan.A key area of interest to agriculture will be the handling of state-owned enterprises. Its importance can be seen in the current Congressional effort to correct the import safeguard laws in their application to nonmarket economies like China. Also, the archaic and complex rules of origin need to be streamlined. Al...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.