Inequivalent, Protectionist In 2012, the U.S. and EU established an agreement asserting that each other’s organic standards were substantially equivalent. The agreement was reviewed again in 2015 and may require additional review depending on one’s interpretation of “substantial” and equivalent. The EU’s first organic directive occurred in 1991 and was directed at unprocessed commodities. In 1999, animal agriculture was added, and a new directive was introduced in 1999. Now a new directive goes into effect in January 2022 and it has some changes that could undermine the equivalency agreement. The new EU rule claims that producers in third countries must comply with the “same standards” as European...
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.