East Asia and TPP A Wilson Center program yesterday on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and agriculture provided some notable insights.Takashi Terada from Waseda University notes all the burdens facing Japanese exporters, such as a strong yen (exports are slowing), high corporate taxes (39.54 percent versus 39.25 percent in the U.S.), labor burdens, insufficient electricity, etc. Moreover, tariffs are owed on 85 percent of the goods exported, including on 60 percent of the stuff shipped to the U.S. Still, he appears dubious about TPP's chances. He notes that 60 percent of the public supports joining the TPP but there are 12 million signatories opposing it and the fate of the Noda government rests with first pushing through a proposed consum...
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.