Congress will return to Washington this week to kick off the post-election lame duck session of Congress. The docket is busy with only 12 joint legislative days left and government funding set to expire on 20 December. And the Farm Bill is set to expire on 31 December unless an extension can be passed before then.With the change in party control in the Senate, there will be some reshuffling of committee assignments and new chairmen in place. On the Agriculture Committee, Ranking Republican Representative Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) is expected to become chairman in the next Congress which convenes in January. That might not be the only change in committee leadership, however.Current Chair David Scott (D-Georgia), aged 79, has been suffe...
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...