Cancellation of Convenience The WTO’s 12th ministerial conference scheduled to begin next week has reportedly been postponed due to news of a new COVID variant being circulated. The new variant provides a delay for a meeting that, at this juncture, did not have a lot of hope for agreement. There are never guarantees of agreement before many multilateral fora but perhaps even less when it comes to the WTO. New versions of text are still circulating, and members may meet virtually, but an organization as divided as this one could have benefited from direct, in-person negotiations. Fox in the Henhouse The new German government may include an agriculture minister coming from the Green Party. Reportedly, Steffi Lemke is in line fo...
A federal appeals court paused a USITC ruling against President Trump’s use of Section 122 to impose 10-percent global tariffs. A bipartisan group of 80 House members asked USTR to investigate specialty crop imports from Mexico for unfair trade practices. India notified the WT...
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.