Japan and TPP U.S. and Japanese officials meet tomorrow to discuss Tokyo's desire to join the TPP negotiations. Washington fully capitulated on the use of zeroing in safeguard cases to set the tone. The U.S. has more offensive issues, but there is room for compromise in the horse-trading. Tokyo wanting exemption from liberalization for its rice is understandable; however, Japanese ownership of a dominating industry like autos means it needs to let go on this sector. The fact that the U.S. reportedly seeks an import target indicates doubt that American cars can compete even if all the technical barriers come down.The precedent for agricultural exemptions includes rice in the Korea FTA and sugar in the Australia FTA. The core objective of...
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.