With a renegotiation of NAFTA high on the incoming Trump administration’s agenda, a new Commerce Department investigation may tee up sugar as one of the first sectors to be discussed. However, it will be within the context of a vastly changing market for sugar in the U.S. than has existed for the past 20 years.Since NAFTA was passed in 1993, one of the most contentious sectors in its implementation has been sugar and sweeteners. This includes imports of Mexican sugar into the U.S. and exports of U.S. high fructose corn sweetener to Mexico. Sweetener trade has been subject to many side agreements with the most recent one executed in 2014, which limits refined sugar into the United States. That year, the U.S. sugar industry filed antidumping...
What You Need to Know Today: A third U.S. border crossing (Columbus, New Mexico) has reopened to Mexican cattle imports following nearly two years of restrictions related to New World screwworm. The reopening could gradually improve feeder cattle availability, although more than 60 confi...
Yesterday, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released a new report of negotiated cash purchases of cattle under the mandatory price report. The report included Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The goal of the report was to solve the confidentiality issues e...
Key Takeaways: U.S. soybean crushing began in 1911 and saw its most rapid expansion during the 1930s amid the broader agricultural and technology revolutions of the time. After peaking in the early 2000s, the soybean crushing industry went through a downturn as poor crush margins forced...
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.