Sour Grapes Outgoing WTO Director General Pascal Lamy has many good qualities but he showed his sour side this week. He complained about the big bilateral and regional trade deals currently being negotiated (TPP and TTIP), but his complaints ring hollow. He said harmonizing transatlantic rules on things like autos would raise barriers to other countries, but other countries would only have to meet one transatlantic rule instead of the two separate American and European rules they now face. He agonized that it could make reaching a multilateral deal more difficult, but the Doha effort has been deader than a door nail on its own for over a dozen years. He also fretted that the new deals would not address western farm subsidies. However,...
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.