The government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now the social justice warrior class in the U.S. are framing the impending ban on GMO corn imports as fulfilling their right to food sovereignty. U.S. corn exports to Mexico are around 17 MMT worth about $3.3 billion. Overall agricultural trade between the two countries is growing rapidly, though Mexico sells nearly 60 percent more to the U.S. than it imports from America, which makes the food sovereignty argument specious at best. While 45 percent of Mexico’s corn consumption is imported, 60 percent of American fresh fruit consumption is imported and nearly 40 percent of its fresh vegetables. Importantly for Mexico, more than 88 percent of Mexico...
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.