Bias and GMO Labeling The International Food Information Council (IFIC) issued the results of its annual survey of consumer attitudes and found just 3 percent of Americans want their food labeled for GMOs (see graph below). This contrasts with the Just Label It campaign that found 93 percent of Americans want such labeling.The wide variance can be attributed to who conducted the surveys and how (see table below).Unfortunately, neither the activists nor the politicians attempt to describe to the public the actual complexity of public policymaking. As University of Chicago professor of behavioral science Reid Hastie explains, the human mind is more comfortable with simple causal narratives than with the scientific and complex. By blaming s...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.