Russia With Love: As we noted back on 3 May, U.S. meat exporters and the Obama Administration are set to give Moscow a big wet kiss on the ractopamine issue. In exchange for certifying that meat was not raised using the drug, they hope to reopen an important market. The history of meat trade with Russia is that this tactic will work for a while, until Russia dreams up another rationale for protecting its less efficient producers. If it really is about selling what the customer wants, then the U.S. should concurrently pursue a WTO dispute settlement case against the restriction. However, like the watered down rapid response mechanism offered up on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) barriers in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations...
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.