Seeing a Rising Sun U.S. business groups have submitted to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) their wish list for a bilateral trade agreement with Japan and will physically appear at a hearing on the matter on Monday (10 December). Their demands are ambitious by Japanese standards – they want a comprehensive agreement with meaningful economic impacts. U.S. agriculture was to be a major beneficiary of increased food exports within the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Japan was to import most of the increased food trade under that agreement. Now U.S. agriculture looks to achieve that lost opportunity in a bilateral agreement. Tokyo-based journalist William Pesek is correct in noting that Prime Minister Shinzō Abe will be under pr...
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.