Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to eliminate the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), but it has no chance at enactment. However, more notable is the concession in Washington by some policy supporters of biofuels. TPA Strategy Senate Democrats feared that House Republicans would pass Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) but not Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), so they insisted on tying the two together. Instead, it was House Democrats who blocked TAA in order to prevent enactment of TPA. Now the strategy is to pass TPA and TAA separately in the Senate and TPA in the House, forcing House Democrats to agree to TAA or else lose both on trade and the $450 million in labor retraining benefits. The gambit requires Senate Democrats t...
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.