Ever since the tit-for-tat tariff war between the U.S. and China began last July, the dispute has dominated the trade agenda within the Trump administration, Congress and the business community. U.S. agricultural products have been a key target of China’s retaliatory tariffs, picked because farmers and ranchers were an important part of President Trump’s base support in the 2016 election. They will also be relied upon for support during the 2020 campaign. Agricultural markets have been particularly sensitive to the ups and downs of the several months of spasmodic U.S.-Chinese negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict. A string of optimistic and pessimistic comments coming from U.S. and Chinese negotiators as well as Presiden...
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.