Today was National Agriculture Trade Day, an effort to boost awareness about the benefits of trade to the sector. However, the milestone also sparked debate about the increasing U.S. agricultural trade deficit, and the advisability of the Trump tariff war. President Trump’s goal is said to be a more fair and equitable trading system for the U.S. The status quo is described as unfair and unsustainable. Implicit in that assessment is a criticism of past policies that placed the U.S. in the position of running huge trade deficits. But it is sectors like agriculture that are being hurt in the interim by efforts to rectify the situation. There is still great uncertainty about how the war is being conducted, its true aims, and w...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.