The marathon trilogue negotiations between the European Commission, European Parliament, and the European Council failed to achieve agreement on revisions to the Common Agricultural Program. The failure is not surprising. The U.S. farm bill is written between just two legislative bodies, and it has been forced into simple extensions in the past. Successful new EU laws are impressive because of the larger political hurdles that must be navigated. As can be expected under the fatigue of near-round the clock negotiating, trilogue partners expressed frustration about each other in its aftermath. However, the farm lobby, Copa & Cogeca squarely placed blame on Farm Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, saying he was weak and lacked underst...
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.
A federal appeals court paused a USITC ruling against President Trump’s use of Section 122 to impose 10-percent global tariffs. A bipartisan group of 80 House members asked USTR to investigate specialty crop imports from Mexico for unfair trade practices. India notified the WT...