Everyone Thrown Under the Bus: In a perverse attempt to come into compliance with an adverse WTO ruling against country of origin labeling (COOL) for beef, pork and lamb, the Obama Administration has constructed a revised rule that caused one U.S. industry representative to react by saying, "Now they've thrown everyone under the bus." Under the proposal, all meat domestic and imported will have to be tracked from birth, through growth and into slaughter.Contrary to the Administration's claim that "The major cost of implementing the proposed amendments would be incurred at the packing or processing facility," the proposed removal of the current commingling of origins on the label will have retailers burdened as they've never been before. M...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
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.