With the Republicans maintaining control of the House, Representative G.T. Thompson (R-PA) will retain the gavel as committee chairman, unless he is nominated for Secretary of Agriculture by President-elect Trump. Thompson’s name has been mentioned more frequently as of late as a potential nominee, but the three front runners remain Indiana farmer and former Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations Kip Tom, former USDA Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) Ted McKinney who was also formerly the Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, and who now leads the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), and current Texas Department of Agricultu...
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.
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...