Macroeconomics Food Inflation Up in May, First Time Since January With live hog and retail pork prices nosediving, food inflation remained in negative territory from February through April. Despite rising prices for vegetable oil, eggs, fresh vegetable, and fresh fruit during that period, the drop in pork prices at the retail level more than offset the increases. That changed in May. In the aggregate, food prices last month were up by .3 percent from May 2020. Leading the uptick were fresh vegetables, eggs, fresh fruit, cooking oil, and dairy products, which jumped by 5.4 percent, 14.3 percent, 1.4 percent, 8.2 percent, and 2.3 percent, respectively. Pork prices fell by 23.8 percent from a year ago. Outside of food infl...
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.