MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS As a point of information, November 2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Its purpose was to eliminate harmful trade protectionism, which had pushed global trade down 65 percent during the Great Depression. GATT reversed that trend by removing tariffs, and it restored economic health to the world after the devastation of World War II. Turkey is expected to revise its new import procedures due to the complications they will cause with needed shipments. Domestic importers are concerned about the impact on their purchases of Russian wheat and vegetable oils. As has been widely reported, the new measures were mainly a reaction to Russia&rsq...
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.