Food has historically been traded based on relative price whereby low-cost producers dominate the marketplace. Border tax advocates now want to add the cost of an externality, greenhouse gas emissions. This change could possibly turn the world on its head. Since meat is criticized for being a major culprit of climate change, it provides a good example of potentially outsized effects from giving more weight to emissions than to price. Based on FAO data on the intensity of emissions by country and meat product, rain forest advocates will be glad to know that Brazil should not be producing and exporting beef, milk (products), lamb, eggs, or pork. But strictly looking at the intensity of CO2 equivalent emissions per kilogram of meat product pr...
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.