Policymakers in recent years have sought ways to offset the market's tendency toward commoditization in agriculture and thus raise farmer income by extracting high prices from consumers. Doha Reality Hit The market has changed since the Doha round was launched nearly 13 years ago, but some negotiators are stuck in a surreal past. The Bali ministerial last December supposedly sparked renewed enthusiasm for completing Doha. However, reality was delivered last week when major developed countries argued in Geneva that the intervening years have seen the emergence of big developing countries which cannot escape larger policy contributions under the premise of being poor (China is set to be the world's largest economy this year), and there must...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.