International organizations are warning that COVID-19 and the associated economic recession will increase hunger in poorer countries. To quote World Food Program leader David Beasley, there will be “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” Looking at Sub-Saharan Africa, GDP growth may impact the production of basic food crops like rice and maize, but the data hardly shows “biblical proportions - even during the Great Recession. Right now, the countries adversely impacted by rising food costs include Sudan, South Sudan, Zimbabwe and Zambia. However, these countries suffer from the usual causes of hardship: conflict and poor governance. This is not to say there will not be impacts but they should be viewed in contex...
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.