Greedy in Bali: Roberto Carvalho de Azevedo of Brazil is the new WTO Director General. While there is initial hope that he can guide the organization to successful early accomplishments at the ministerial in Bali later this year, don't bet on it. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) says that an agreement on trade facilitation will reduce trade costs by 10 percent for rich countries and by 13-15.5 percent for developing countries. The result is that income would increase by $40 billion, mostly in developing counties. But now it is reported that India and some other developing countries are seeking to use the new impetus toward a Bali agreement to demand concessions by the U.S. and Europe to limit their lev...
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.