Trade negotiations are a long, slow process, marked in many cases by small steps on the way to broader market access and more robust trade. A good reminder of that was the joint announcement by USDA and USTR yesterday that India has opened its market to U.S. pork. According to a statement issued by the two agencies, the breakthrough was the result of... … the successful revitalization of the U.S.-India Trade Policy Forum held in New Delhi in November 2021, during which Ambassador Tai raised the importance of access for U.S. pork with Indian Minister of Commerce Piyush Goyal. In turn, that meeting was spurred by Prime Minister Modi’s trip to Washington, D.C. in late September where the Indian delegation agreed to a...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.