Balancing Act On the outskirts of the EU’s annual Outlook conference today, Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski stated that there is the need for a “solid impact assessment” of the proposed 50 percent reduction in pesticide usage by 2030. This resulted in immediate pushback by environmental groups who worry that a more complete understanding would mean less of their understanding. The Dutch are not waiting for an official assessment, they are submitting a CAP plan that already has environmentalists angry. Inside the confab, a USDA official was explaining the conundrum: if productivity is not raised, people will starve, and if production practices do not become more environmentally friendly, the earth will be bur...
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
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.