The U.S.– China trade war has had a far more dramatic impact on American agriculture than it has had on farmers in the Middle Kingdom. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. had a $16 billion agricultural trade surplus with China. In percentage terms, U.S. food sales to China that year were 142 percent greater than PRC agricultural sales to America. By 2019, that advantage had shrunk to just $3.5 billion. As U.S. food sales to China slipped by $8 billion in fiscal year 2019, the Middle Kingdom managed in the middle of the trade war to boost its food sales to the States by nearly $500 million. However, just as the U.S. has had more to lose in a trade war with its largest customer, it has more to gain from the normalization of trad...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...
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.