As noted yesterday, USDA estimates that the food category incurring the most inflation this year in the U.S. will be fresh vegetables. Part of the problem is the disconnect between encouraging consumption of this food group, and domestic production. About 40 percent of fresh vegetables are imported and they have experienced steady growth. The strong U.S. dollar may actually understate the volume growth of imported fresh vegetables. By contrast, domestic production of fresh vegetables is erratic. COVID adversely impacted labor and the supply chain but 2023 saw a bounce back in actual production. The House Agriculture Committee just completed markup of a new farm bill, which includes a title (Horticulture, Marketing and Regulatory Reform) co...
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...