World Perspectives

U.S. Trade Strategy in Africa; USDA Changes Tune; Pick Your Poison

U.S. Trade Strategy in Africa U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new Sub Saharan Africa strategy that focused on governance, security, rebounding from COVID and climate change, but not trade. An FTA with Kenya has been stalled, and South Africa is asking for elimination of Section 232 tariffs on its steel and aluminum. Meanwhile, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which also ignores enticements such as increased trade, is failing to attract more countries. The Administration’s “soft” policy approach is occurring at the same time countries may be growing cool to it. The Nikkei reports that Japan has lost interest in the themes of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG), and Sustainable Development Goals...

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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.

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