Besmirch Strategy Fails Activists called it an acute health threat, orchestrated petitions and demanded that institutions only serve domestic pork. Despite a well-organized campaign of opposition to importing U.S. pork raised with the beta-agonist growth promoter ractopamine, Taiwan's parliament this week approved legislation approving it. Denigrating the reputation of an imported product as a means of blocking competition is not new. In 1962, U.S. chicken had captured a significant share of the French and West German poultry markets. A Time magazine article that year noted that in response, the French government banned imports of U.S. chicken with complaints that the use of hormones could affect male virility. German farmers' associations...
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...