U.S. tariffs are reordering world trade and may further impact the nation’s agricultural exports. While soybean exports to China are stalled as that nation redirects all of its purchases to South America, that has been a political position that ignores the lower cost of U.S. soybeans. However, the application of tariffs is also rearranging the economics of trade. Washington accepted Brazil’s WTO challenge of its new tariff regime, and it will claim national security as their rationale. The new tariffs will remain regardless of how the WTO rules on the national security claim. Jurists in the case will have a real dilemma. If it concedes on the national security argument, then countries will more frequently invoke it as the...
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.