The repeated threat of sanctions by the EU and U.S. were not enough to prevent Vladimir Putin from moving on Ukraine, and they likely will not be enough to affect Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. He has been the president of the country for most of the past 15 years and the U.S. argues it is because he has repressed his political rivals. Washington is threatening to either remove Nicaragua’s access to the U.S. sugar import quota or kick the country out of CAFTA. Of those two choices, CAFTA bears more weight. Nicaragua already has a relatively small share of the U.S. sugar import quota. It represents just 2.9 percent of Nicaraguan agricultural exports to the U.S. By contrast, ending the broader CAFTA trade agreement benefits received by Ni...
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.
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...