Trading Barbs WTO: There is a special Agriculture Committee meeting at the WTO next week, and the disparate views of its members are being previewed ahead of it. The varied demands include the following: improvements in market access, disciplines on farm subsidies by rich countries, disciplines on farm subsidies by those that have recently increased them, special safeguards, public stockholding, etc. No one really needs to study up for the special meeting since the issues to be discussed have bounced around for nearly two decades under the failed Doha agenda. Illegal Meets Illegal: The EU claims that Donald Trump’s Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum are illegal. The initial solution from Brussels was to impose retaliatory tar...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.