World Perspectives

Regulation Ruse; FTA’s Needed; Big is Bad

Regulation RuseFarmers in Europe oppose the recently completed free trade agreement with Mercosur, and have long prevented a transatlantic agreement with the U.S. They argue that their competitors in the Americas produce under less stringent environmental and labor standards. That may be true but that is not the primary cause of their struggles with competitiveness. The problem is that the fundamentals of production agriculture in Europe are much higher. The average cost of farmland in France is 50 percent higher than in the U.S. There is a large differential in energy costs, a critical component in farming (chemicals, fertilizer, fuel, lube, electricity) and Europe has by design made it costlier. Europe’s farmers cannot use the latest...

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

European Market Analysis

Regional News On Monday morning, Russia announced that its 15 February – 30 June 2025 wheat export quota will be 10.6 MMT, slightly below the 11.0 MMT announced at the EEU meeting last month. Milling Wheat Global wheat markets continue to see pressure from slowing U.S. exports an...

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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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