World Perspectives

Preparing Japanese Agriculture; UTP Implications; Trade War Perspective

Preparing Japanese Agriculture Japan has long protected its agriculture sector over fears of food security and as a political payoff since there is a structural bias for rural voters. Despite these protections, the small, inefficient agriculture sector has left the country with a self-sufficiency ratio of just 0.3, among the lowest in the G-20. Not only is the current course unsustainable, it is threatened by further trade liberalization and demographic changes that cannot be stopped. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has been working to improve the sector’s competitiveness and lessen its political power. For example, the pork sector is looking at a checkoff program, whereby farmers would help fund their own research and promotion efforts...

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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.

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