In their report, “China's Import Potential for Beef, Corn, Pork, and Wheat,” Economic Research Service analysts correctly note that the Middle Kingdom maintains large technical barriers to U.S. agricultural exports. They note the large spread in prices between China and the U.S. on basic commodities (see graph below). Indeed, barriers are why U.S. agricultural exports to China are up 6 percent this fiscal year but China’s food exports to the U.S. are up 24 percent for the same period. It is also one of the reasons the U.S. is projected to run an overall agricultural trade deficit in 2023. However, none of this information is going to change reality because other countries prize self-sufficiency, and none more than China...
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.