Corporate Welfare or Survival Previous Democratic campaign promises of antitrust investigations into Big Ag have likely diminished with the lack of a Blue Wave in this week’s election but there are substantive reasons for its decline. Much as automobile manufacturing evolved from a largely domestic affair dominated by the Big Three, agricultural commodity handling and processing has been globalized. Instead of just the ABCD’s controlling 73 percent of global grain trade as Oxfam claims they did almost a decade ago, they now compete with Japan’s sōgō shōsha, coops out of Europe, trading houses that previously focused on mining and handling metals, and more importantly, newly evolving state-owned enterprises. In Chin...
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.
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...