U.S. Ag's Skepticism of EU The joint EU-U.S. Working Group on Jobs and Growth (see WPI 24 February) is trying to calculate how best to move forward on a trade liberalization agenda, but U.S. aggies are skeptical that much will be accomplished on their complaints. While some EU officials would like to use the effort to overcome their own domestic policy hurdles, there is doubt on this side of the pond that politics within Europe would ever allow the dismantling of the technical barriers to agricultural imports. The reality check will come when the Commission seeks a negotiating mandate from its member states. The view is that even a "mutual recognition" clause on regulatory barriers is likely to either be rejected, or be filled with such...
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.