Congress is back in session today after a two-week recess for Easter and Passover, and the four weeks until the Memorial Day recess will be crucial for some key issues of interest to agriculture. Disaster Aid -When Congress left for its break, a supplemental disaster aid package that would cover the flooding in the Corn Belt and hurricane damage in the South was left undone, primarily due to a dispute over the amount of funding provided for Puerto Rico. The total amount of aid varies from $13 billion to $17 billion in various proposals. The bill that was moving through the Senate provided $13.5 billion, which included $600 million in nutritional assistance for Puerto Rico. Senate Democrats withheld support to leverage a total of $1.1 billi...
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.