Back in 2013, under the U.S. sugar program, sugar refiners and processors were headed toward forfeiting more than 350,000 MT of sugar under loan, which triggered the Feedstock Flexibility Program (FFP). That program, created in the 2008 farm bill, requires USDA to purchase surplus sugar (technically prevent forfeiture), and re-sell it to bioenergy producers in order to reduce the surplus in the food use market and support sugar prices. FFP was mostly a bust across the board. Going into the program, USDA estimated that they could sell the sugar to ethanol mills for between 7 and 8 cents a pound; instead USDA netted an average of 3 cents a pound. Moreover, some of the sugar never made its way into ethanol production because ethanol producers...
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.