China is prohibiting government procurement of all Apple products and Moscow has announced food import bans that only crudely reference any kind of WTO justification. If countries can impose import barriers for blatant political reasons and bear no consequences, then the WTO is not worth the paper it is written upon. Geopolitical Trade Wars A large majority of respondents in a recent WPI survey categorized Ukraine and the Middle East as the most concerning geopolitical problems, while just 18 percent mentioned China. Yet China plays a much larger role in the global economy and risks missteps in the South China Sea that could cause serious repercussions. Both China and Russia skip any effort at subtlety, with China prohibiting government p...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.