LDP Chooses TPP: Reports indicate that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has instructed his cabinet ministers to begin more proactively pursuing trade negotiations, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). When Mr. Abe visits Washington next month he likely will be looking for reassurance from President Obama that he will receive leeway on the one area of most sensitivity in Japan: agriculture. In particular, Tokyo needs the ability to continue protecting the domestic rice industry. Given the political need for Washington to avoid an internal political fight over defensive products like sugar and perhaps dairy, it is a plausible concession for the White House to offer. An additional benefit would be identifying areas where more com...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Key Takeaways: India is excluding sugarcane juice, sugar syrup, and B-heavy molasses from its 2026/27 fuel ethanol procurement program to protect domestic sugar supplies, potentially shifting additional demand toward corn and rice. India’s corn consumption for ethanol has surged from jus...
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.