In the past three years, India has switched from being the number four exporter of sugar in the world to number two. Over the past dozen years, its domestic production has grown by 56 percent, but its exports have exploded by 229 percent. It turns out there is a reason. In a WTO challenge by Australia, Brazil and Guatemala, it turns out that New Delhi has exceeded its bindings on how much domestic support it can provide to sugar growers. Almost worse, it failed in its obligation to notify the WTO of its subsidies. India’s actions breed distrust in at least two ways: 1) the country had already been caught exceeding its subsidy bindings on other agricultural products and its failure of notification undermines the WTO; and 2) it p...
A federal appeals court paused a USITC ruling against President Trump’s use of Section 122 to impose 10-percent global tariffs. A bipartisan group of 80 House members asked USTR to investigate specialty crop imports from Mexico for unfair trade practices. India notified the WT...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.