World Perspectives

Worst Time; Microchips and Food

Worst Time The U.S. House Agriculture Committee has begun hearings in preparation for writing the 2023 version of the farm bill. This week’s hearings cover conservation and livestock; next week the Committee will hear from USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie on commodities and risk management. University of Tennessee Professor Daryll Ray is not usually right, but he has correctly observed that the writing of this farm bill will occur during a period of high prices and intensive political partisanship. Dr. Ray is a proponent of supply management and so he calls writing a farm bill during high prices the “worst time” since it often involves a policy that is ultimately inadequate for when prices eventually fall.  Indeed,...

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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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