One country's strategic interest is another's free enterprise.One of the challenges for U.S. Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiators is achieving disciplines on the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that exist in most countries. The concern is less in areas where there are so-called "natural" monopolies, such as railroad systems, than in the plethora of sectors where government proclaims a "strategic interest." One country's strategic interest is another's free enterprise. Even where SOEs have been privatized, though, there can be unfair global competition when businesses are allowed to collude.This is the situation in China where the Chamber of Commerce of Foodstuffs and Native Products has announced that its member companies have a...
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.