Taxes on sugary soft drinks are on several municipal ballots tomorrow, but will they achieve their desired results? Meanwhile, TPP is practically dead and the EU will adopt subsidies to encourage precision farming. Sugar Tax Election A tax on sugary soft drinks is on the ballot in at least four cities tomorrow. Three California jurisdictions each propose a tax of one cent per ounce. A similar UC-Berkley tax found that only around half the tax cost is passed on to consumers, meaning the result will be about six cents per 12-ounce can of soda. With vending machines charging a minimum of $1/can, any change in actual behavior is likely to be minimal. Health advocates are hoping for a consumption decline like that experienced when cigarette ta...
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.