EU Step Toward U.S. Beef Access Quota This week the European Commission formally asked member states for a mandate to negotiate with the U.S. over guaranteed access for a specified volume of U.S. beef. This addresses a 20-year-old situation with the Hilton, more commonly referred to as the “high quality beef” (HQB) quota. The EU blocked U.S. beef imports because of the treatment with hormones, but the U.S. won a WTO challenge in 1999 to that trade barrier and was authorized to place $116 million worth of EU exports on a retaliation list. A negotiated settlement was reached in 2009, which created the HQB quota of 45,000 MT for hormone-free, grain-fed beef, and the U.S. retaliatory tariffs were phased out in 2011. However, the U...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.