Missing the Mark Proponents of an agriculture agreement at the WTO Ministerial in November are arguing it is needed to help the approximately 800 million people currently suffering from hunger. However, the cause of their hunger has very little to do with the new rules being proposed. With or without WTO rules, hunger is not a problem in countries with good domestic governance, minimal corruption, and little social strife. At the same time, the enactment of new rules on trade such as larger import safeguards and public stockholding will not end the corruption and poor governance that underlies much hunger where it exists. Not only are these new proposed rules being oversold when it comes to hunger, they will also not help address other mal...
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.