Mixed Action for U.S. Exporters The Biden Administration announced an initiative to boost U.S. business opportunities abroad. The effort will be led by the State Department, USTR, and the Commerce Department. No USDA. American industry has long run trade deficits but now agriculture has slipped into one. The initiative will reportedly focus on economic diplomacy. The fundamentals hurting U.S. agriculture include high labor costs, a strong dollar, new competition from South America, and the lack of new trade agreements. The latter may be part of the reason that Republicans are proposing budget cuts to USTR – the agency isn’t performing its function of negotiating trade agreements. Attacking American Citizens EU competition off...
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.
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...