The U.S. sugar price is artificially held so high that the product is being smuggled across the border, and now it's politically-created distortions are threatening the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Devaluation Game China declared that its change in exchange rate policy, allowing the renminbi (RMB) to adjust based on the prior day's forex market, is an effort to be more market-based. Defenders say it is an effort by China to hush critics of the country's exchange rate policy. However, the RMB is still framed in by a trading band, and others note that it is more likely to be Beijing rushing into the "devaluation game" since the economy has softened.China's currency policy has proved malleable over tim...
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.