The Biden Administration announced a $1 billion program to incentivize “independent processing capacity” in the meat industry. Noting the irony of U.S. policy concurrently criticizing state-driven enterprise in China, the major meat packers responded with some pointed questions: • How much extra fabrication capacity is needed? • How high should cattle prices be? • How long will “independent” processors be subsidized? • How much will these new government paid packers be required to pay employees? (labor is the biggest challenge confronting the industry) This is not to say that imperfect competition does not exist in agrifood or in any other industry. Researchers in Canada and the U.S. examined...
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.