It was announced on 24 June that China will revise its food safety law to include tougher rules for safety and stricter supervision. However, decentralized food production systems and a highly fragmented food processing industry make it a challenge to implement the law consistently at all levels. China Seeks Options to Reduce Large Corn Reserves A National Development of Reform and Commission (NDRC) official recently claimed that China's grain stocks total 350 MMT, which include 150 MMT of corn. Government authorities are examining several options to reduce the large corn reserves in order to avoid significant financial burdens and a storage capacity shortage. The first possibility involves continuing the current corn reserve auctions, al...
The Olympic marmot (Marmota olympus) is a rodent in the squirrel family, Sciuridae. It occurs only in the U.S. state of Washington, at the middle elevations of the Olympic Peninsula. The closest relatives of this species are the hoary marmot and the Vancouver Island marmot. In 2009, it was decl...
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...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.