High Duty Reduces Edible Oil Imports Edible oil imports dropped in December 2017 following an increase in the duty the previous month, falling approximately 9.88 percent to 1.058 MMT versus 1.174 MMT in December 2016. They totaled 2.283 MMT for the two months of November and December 2017, down only 2 percent from 2.330 MMT during the same period of the previous year. Refined oil imports declined 47.43 percent to 0.254 MMT in November-December 2017 from 0.486 MMT the previous year. However, crude oil imports increased 10.09 percent to 2.029 MMT from 1.843 MMT in November-December 2016. Soft oil imports also rose to 0.843 MMT in those months last year from 0.805 MMT in the same two-month period of 2016. Meanwhile, palm oil imports were dow...
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...
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
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.