Agroecology’s Day in Court The economists at USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) calculated that the EU’s Farm to Fork initiative would result in reduced use of agricultural inputs, which in turn would cut production and increase prices. By contrast, researchers published a report in the journal Science Advances that agriculture can be diversified, inputs reduced and the ecosystem improved without compromising yield. The use of multiple meta-analyses, plus second-order meta-analysis on thousands of studies sounds credible, but is it too good to be true? Of the nine researchers involved, 66 percent had terms in their titles such as ecology, agroecology, environmental, sustainability, and biodiversity. That raises...
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...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.