White commodities is an American euphemism for three crops, cotton, rise, and sugar, that are all white in color and each have statutory programs considered complex or unique. They are generally produced in the U.S. south, and their traits include: Cotton: A chemically intensive crop with the largest subsidy on an area basis, and with a mostly non-food use except for cottonseed oil. The more valuable Pima variety is grown in Arizona and California. Rice: A water intensive crop with methane emissions and strong competition from Asian varieties. Sugar: A dubious nutrition profile that is subsidized by consumers via strict import limitations. India is the largest rice exporter, and its crop is down due to a late monsoon, and its suga...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
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.