Water is the world’s most important commodity, but also its most underappreciated—until scarcity starts. Water scarcity runs in cycles, and reports of shortages, debates on policy, and conflicts about ownership and usage pop up every few years with the reliability and sameness of Fa...
With the spring planting effort just around the corner, producers and traders are starting to get a handle on the outlook for the coming marketing year. That outlook suffered a bit of a shock following the January WASDE report, as USDA reiterated the large-supply narrative for U.S. and world gr...
GI Chimera The EU-Mercosur trade agreement has hit another stumbling block after the European Parliament asked the EU’s high court to first assess the text for its legality. Once that exercise is complete, Europe’s politicians promise plenty more hurdles to stymie agricultural impor...
Economy and Diet The decline in China’s population, with the birthrate falling 17 percent to its lowest since 1949, is likely having some impact on total food consumption. Slower-than-reported economic growth may also be a factor, as 2025 saw lower agricultural prices and fewer imports. M...
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.