Due Diligence Criticism A piece in Politico by Europe-based reporters Eddy Wax and Sarah Anne Aarup entitled, “How Brussels Wants to Make Your Shopping Woke” has awakened Washington to another potential impending transatlantic trade issue. The article takes issue with the effort in Brussels to make business responsible for ensuring that their products and value chains are not harmful to the environment or to human rights. The so-called due diligence regulation is described as complicated and likely difficult to enforce. However, the concept also may unleash a slippery slope of countries imposing their own woke standards on businesses and trade. For example, conservative and religious countries could insist that value chains pro...
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.