Transatlantic GI’ing Consumers; Political Expediency, Oh My
Transatlantic GI’ing Consumers Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic protest big business and their sacrilegious capitalism. Yet sometimes it is government screwing the consumer to boost private profits. Parmigiano Reggiano was a prized and premium priced cheese before obtaining the E...
Biden-Trump on Trade Policy
A Washington International Trade Association discussion on trade policy with former officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations reinforced the bipartisan agreement on some trade policies. A day after House GOP representatives slammed USTR Katherine Tai for the Biden Administration&r...
Supply Chain Diversity; Clean Hands?; Bipolar Politics
Supply Chain Diversity EU policy experts have assembled a tome on the “State of Food Security in the EU.” The biannual report focuses on how to ensure food security in times of crisis. The authors highlight the growing concerns about extreme adverse weather events in the EU. They lo...
Farm Bill and Prop 12 Federal Preemption
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) has stated that he will move a farm bill draft out of committee in May; the Ranking Minority Member, David Scott (D-Georgia) has indicated that he’ll work with Thompson to have a bipartisan timeline to work on the legisl...
Sparks to Fly; Selective Competitiveness; Fixing India
Sparks to Fly U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai appears before House and Senate committees this week to testify on the Biden Administration’s 2024 trade policy. Over the past three years, the Office of U.S. Trade Representative has slow walked trade policy changes, focusing on labor...
Higher Interest Rates to Stay
This week’s inflation reports have added some turbulence to the Federal Reserve’s approach to bringing the economy in for a soft landing. The Fed started an unprecedented set of rate hikes to the federal funds rate in Q2 2022 that helped tame inflation through Q3 2024. T...
Wrong at the Top; Happy Talk
Wrong at the Top We admit as private policy analysts that sometimes we add 1+1 and get three. It turns out top government officials can make the same mistake. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack had mused aloud that China could be buying Brazilian corn and not U.S. corn in retaliation for state-level re...
Livestock Roundup: NASS Dropping July Cattle Report, Revising Other Data Collection
The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced this week that it will not publish the July cattle inventory report. Further it will dop the county estimates for livestock beginning this year – as well as the country crop estimates, which will impact the data available...
Food and IT Arrogance; Intentional Trade Policy
Food and IT Arrogance The EU was supposed to issue an updated “protein strategy” early this year but it has been postponed until perhaps late this summer. Its political leaders are flustered that two-thirds of the Continent’s high-quality protein and most of its soybeans are i...
Outcomes Not Competition; Fair, Individually Sustainable
Outcomes Not Competition Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” are so century before last. Instead of a dog-eat-dog world, the Biden Administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion approach is coming after anyth...
Biofuel Round-Up
E15: It is 9 April; by 1 May terminals that blend gasoline with ethanol need to be in compliance with summer-grade gasoline specifications that are effective on 1 June. The ethanol industry has pressed EPA for another emergency waiver for year-round E15 use in the summer of 2024. EPA did approv...
Non-Trade Representative; FDI Environment
Non-Trade Representative U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is a lawyer by training, not an economist – and it shows. She is blaming globalization and the competition that entails for forcing “harmful” consolidation of businesses in the U.S. and abroad. Economists would n...
Livestock Roundup: FMMO Hearing Now Closed, New Proposed Order Coming in July
The Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) hearing is now closed. All final arguments had to be submitted by 1 April. From 23 August 2023 through 30 January 2024, there were 49 days of hearings, the longest on record, with more than 12,000 pages of transcribed oral arguments in addition to all wri...
AI and Ag; Currency Concerns
AI and Ag Public policy on artificial intelligence is a tricky topic. On the one hand, policymakers are trying to avoid their worst fears about its potential impacts, at the same time there is a geopolitical Cold War level race for data dominance. An overly precautionary approach would kill the...
Trade Negotiation Calendar; NTE Concerns
Trade Negotiation Calendar This week will include U.S. and EU officials gathering in Brussels for the sixth, and potentially last session of the Trade and Technology Council. There will reportedly be agreements on AI, 6G and the microchip supply chain. Meanwhile, U.S. and Kenyan officials hold...
Divergent Perspectives
China doesn’t offer the best business environment for American companies and FDI has plummeted. But Xi Jinping told CEO’s that his country will continue building a “first class business environment.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden tells American companies that they are monopolies...
BRICS Grain Exchange; EU Policy Foibles; Yen Implosion
BRICS Grain Exchange Russia is reportedly pushing other BRICS members to use the bloc as a grain exchange in competition with the West. The assertion is that these countries already control 42 percent of the grain trade. Add the new members like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE, plus other...
Factless Nostalgia; Cash is King
Factless Nostalgia There is yet another crusader against the modern agrifood system. This time it is Austin Frerick, who claims authenticity due to his Iowa roots but he is just another Ivy League university (Yale) pontificator hollering from the ivory tower. His book, “Barons,” com...
HPAI Spreads to Mammals; Detected on Dairy Farms
Yesterday, there were two reports made public of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) detections in livestock. First, kid goats in Minnesota, who were in what was a former backyard poultry operation depopulated due to HPAI. That set of circumstances created a situation where there was a hig...
Fixing the WTO; The Winner is Ag
Fixing the WTO The 13th Ministerial Conference last month in Abu Dhabi was yet another failure by the WTO. Now Singapore has proposed a retreat to discuss fundamental fixes needed to stop the long string of failures. Ultimately, the structural problems of the WTO involve one country, one vote a...
Fake Meat Fight; Transatlantic Mutuality; Biofuel Instead of Food
Fake Meat Fight Some western state U.S. Senate Democrats are in tough reelection positions and need to show their distance from President Biden. Following SPS protocols, President Biden recently approved imports of beef from Paraguay. Today the Senate passed a resolution overturning the Preside...
Policy Shorts
India Paradox: A new report using the Modified Mixed Recall Period shows that over the past decade, India matched China’s success in the decade before in eliminating extreme poverty. It has not experienced the same growth in GDP, but its programs and policies made progress. At the same ti...
Trade Negotiation Calculation; UTP = You and Me; Real and Imagined
Trade Negotiation Calculation The WTO’s dispute settlement system and new multilateral trade negotiations fail from the perspective of Donald Trump and now Joe Biden because they put all parties on equal footing. This means the U.S. loses its asymmetric advantage of being an economic and...
President’s FY 2025 Budget Request for USDA
While Congress is finishing the last six appropriations bills for FY 2024 (with a deadline of this Friday), President Biden submitted his FY 2025 budget proposal last week with few changes proposed to USDA’s budget. Overall, USDA spending under the President’s request i...
Monetary Policy Between a Rock and a Hard Place
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will meet this week; interest rates were last raised in July 2023, and during Q4 when rates were held steady markets were hopeful that was a signal that a rate cut would be coming in 2024. Right now, however, the Federal Funds Futures market...
Cahiers Redux – Politicians Recoil
The Cahiers de doléances [or kaje for short] were the pre-French revolution (1789) lists of societal complaints. The collective disappointments of the clergy, the nobility, and the rest of society too. Nothing has changed. Documents of the time cite the criticisms as: government waste, i...
Crop Program Payment Estimates for 2024
Today, sign-up for the Ag Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs closes; without a new farm bill, no changes have been made to either program. Producers can choose between the price triggered PLC and the revenue triggered ARC. ARC comes in two forms, ARC County (ARC-CO) and...
Big is Bad; Big is Uncertain; Texas is Big
Big is Bad President Joe Biden has a popular proposal, increase taxes on less than 800 billionaires in the U.S. If some people worry about politics for sale, it still takes votes. Sometimes that happens within a class. Divide and conquer. The EU’s proposed relaxation of GAEC production ob...
Squeaky Wheel; EATS Ugly
Squeaky Wheels Farmers in Europe have been on a rampage for months and it is good that EU political leaders are responding to the complaints. Squeaky wheels get the grease because they are high-pitched and shrill, but sometimes grease is not the cure and instead it requires a whole new set of b...
China’s Veiled Data; Unveiled Livestock Emissions
China’s Veiled Data Some agricultural analysts in the West have noted that Chinese data reporting in the sector can go missing, fail to be consistent, or be even outright false in order to better comport with Beijing’s policy mandates. Now the Financial Times notes that the problem...
More Livestock and Poultry Rules Coming from USDA
On 5 March, WPI reported USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released the second of a series of three new Packers and Stockyards Administration marketing rules. Officially, it is the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity Under the Packers and Stockyards Act but is inform...
Bogus Problem; Radicalism Backlash
Bogus Problem Reinforcing the problem asserted by USDA’s political leadership, the Economic Research Service highlighted Census of Agriculture data showing that most losses of farms over the past decade have been small operations, while there was an increase in the largest sized farms. Se...
Biden Dictates Prices; Dictating Standards; Dictating to Meat
Biden Dictates Prices President Joe Biden tried to position himself in last night’s State of the Union address as the bulwark against the rising tide of threats to democracy. Then he dictated to the banking industry how much they can charge for credit card late fees, threatened action aga...
SOTU: Renewing the Focus on Carbon, Conservation, and Capital Gains
In his State of the Union (SOTU) address, President Biden outlined a number of policy priorities with potential impacts on agriculture. Many of them are prior policy goals and initiatives which have already drawn at least caution, if not opposition, from the ag sector. For example, highlights f...
Livestock Roundup: Updates and Highlights
SOTU Tonight is President Biden’s third State of the Union (SOTU) address. It will be interesting to watch how far he goes on food inflation. In 2022, he said, “so many families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food, gas, housing, and so...
Food Wins; Stating the Obvious
Food Wins Commercial food workers hate fast line speeds at meat processors because it makes them work harder and reduces the required number of workers. Animal rights activists hate faster line speeds at meat packers because more animals get slaughtered. The Biden Administration is certainly su...
Katy Bar the Door; Pursuing Food Sovereignty; USMCA Expansion
Katy Bar the Door Malaysia had filed a WTO dispute settlement case against the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, arguing it is prejudicil in limiting the amount of imported palm oil that could qualify under the scheme. Brussels has pursued other ways to limit imports of palm oil from South...
USDA Issues New Livestock and Poultry Contracting Rule
USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released the second of a series of three new Packers and Stockyards Administration marketing rules. Officially, it is the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity Under the Packers and Stockyards Act but is informally referred to as the &ldquo...
White House Hypocrisy; Support for Thailand; Green Protectionism; The Real Foe
White House Hypocrisy The economy, and specifically inflation, is one of four top issues dogging President Biden’s reelection campaign and the White House has a solution. It is forming a multiagency “strike force” to curb “unfair and illegal” pricing. Most sellers...
MC13 Unsurprisingly Disappoints
USTR is spinning that progress was made at the WTO’s ministerial in Abu Dhabi that ended over the weekend, claiming progress on revitalizing the dispute settlement process, though arriving at no conclusion. There was an extension of the duty-free provision on ecommerce, though even that h...
What is in the Ag Appropriations Bill?
As we reported on Friday, Congress passed and the President signed a short term funding agreement. Moreover, that report advised: Expect a lot of activity over the weekend in what does, and does not, get included in the ag appropriations bill. Indeed, over the weekend House and Senate leadershi...
Policy Quick Hits Updates
Appropriations USDA will be open on Monday 4 March. President Biden signed a short-term, stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill passed by Congress that extends the deadline to finalize a full regular appropriations bill from today until Friday 8 March. Note, this is the fourth...
“Healthy” Food Slows Ag Approps
Last Friday, WPI reported on the status of the appropriations process; Congress has until Friday of this week to pass four appropriations bills, including the one funding agriculture and other agencies. If funding lapses, agencies like USDA will be unable to open on Monday 4 March. House Speake...
Policy Quick Hits
Appropriations Deadline The initial deadline for avoiding a government shutdown is one week from today, 1 March. By that time, Congress needs to pass four appropriations bills, including the agriculture appropriations, as well as the energy and water, military construction and transportat...
Cost of Deception; Trade and Politics; Political Constituencies
Cost of Deception President Joe Biden like other politicians thought he made a clever calculation when he recent;ly blamed food processors for inflation in the sector. As he scorned, “The American public is tired of being played for suckers…I’ve had enough of what they call s...
A Look at Low Carbon Feedstock for Biofuels
At the end of this year the existing biofuel tax credit expires and will be replaced with the new Clean Fuel Production Credit (CFPC) included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022. Those credits which are expiring include the on-again, off-again biodiesel blenders’ tax credit (BTC...
International Agency Capture; Running Out of Crap; Vilsack Shines
International Agency Capture Regulatory capture occurs when a policymaker or regulator is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency. That capture has now occurred to two international agencies, the WTO and the IEA. The WTO is dysfunctional because it has been recast as a developme...
More Subsidies for Scale; APEP Trade; African Humor
More Subsidies for Scale The Biden Administration blames large meat packers for higher consumer prices. Its solution has been to subsidize the startup of small meat packers with grants (Value-Added Producer Grants) and loans. The program has been a smashing success. Over the past year the avera...
Transatlantic GI’ing Consumers; Political Expediency, Oh My
Transatlantic GI’ing Consumers Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic protest big business and their sacrilegious capitalism. Yet sometimes it is government screwing the consumer to boost private profits. Parmigiano Reggiano was a prized and premium priced cheese before obtaining the E...
Biden-Trump on Trade Policy
A Washington International Trade Association discussion on trade policy with former officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations reinforced the bipartisan agreement on some trade policies. A day after House GOP representatives slammed USTR Katherine Tai for the Biden Administration&r...
Supply Chain Diversity; Clean Hands?; Bipolar Politics
Supply Chain Diversity EU policy experts have assembled a tome on the “State of Food Security in the EU.” The biannual report focuses on how to ensure food security in times of crisis. The authors highlight the growing concerns about extreme adverse weather events in the EU. They lo...
Farm Bill and Prop 12 Federal Preemption
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) has stated that he will move a farm bill draft out of committee in May; the Ranking Minority Member, David Scott (D-Georgia) has indicated that he’ll work with Thompson to have a bipartisan timeline to work on the legisl...
Sparks to Fly; Selective Competitiveness; Fixing India
Sparks to Fly U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai appears before House and Senate committees this week to testify on the Biden Administration’s 2024 trade policy. Over the past three years, the Office of U.S. Trade Representative has slow walked trade policy changes, focusing on labor...
Higher Interest Rates to Stay
This week’s inflation reports have added some turbulence to the Federal Reserve’s approach to bringing the economy in for a soft landing. The Fed started an unprecedented set of rate hikes to the federal funds rate in Q2 2022 that helped tame inflation through Q3 2024. T...
Wrong at the Top; Happy Talk
Wrong at the Top We admit as private policy analysts that sometimes we add 1+1 and get three. It turns out top government officials can make the same mistake. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack had mused aloud that China could be buying Brazilian corn and not U.S. corn in retaliation for state-level re...
Livestock Roundup: NASS Dropping July Cattle Report, Revising Other Data Collection
The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced this week that it will not publish the July cattle inventory report. Further it will dop the county estimates for livestock beginning this year – as well as the country crop estimates, which will impact the data available...
Food and IT Arrogance; Intentional Trade Policy
Food and IT Arrogance The EU was supposed to issue an updated “protein strategy” early this year but it has been postponed until perhaps late this summer. Its political leaders are flustered that two-thirds of the Continent’s high-quality protein and most of its soybeans are i...
Outcomes Not Competition; Fair, Individually Sustainable
Outcomes Not Competition Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” are so century before last. Instead of a dog-eat-dog world, the Biden Administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion approach is coming after anyth...
Biofuel Round-Up
E15: It is 9 April; by 1 May terminals that blend gasoline with ethanol need to be in compliance with summer-grade gasoline specifications that are effective on 1 June. The ethanol industry has pressed EPA for another emergency waiver for year-round E15 use in the summer of 2024. EPA did approv...
Non-Trade Representative; FDI Environment
Non-Trade Representative U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is a lawyer by training, not an economist – and it shows. She is blaming globalization and the competition that entails for forcing “harmful” consolidation of businesses in the U.S. and abroad. Economists would n...
Livestock Roundup: FMMO Hearing Now Closed, New Proposed Order Coming in July
The Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) hearing is now closed. All final arguments had to be submitted by 1 April. From 23 August 2023 through 30 January 2024, there were 49 days of hearings, the longest on record, with more than 12,000 pages of transcribed oral arguments in addition to all wri...
AI and Ag; Currency Concerns
AI and Ag Public policy on artificial intelligence is a tricky topic. On the one hand, policymakers are trying to avoid their worst fears about its potential impacts, at the same time there is a geopolitical Cold War level race for data dominance. An overly precautionary approach would kill the...
Trade Negotiation Calendar; NTE Concerns
Trade Negotiation Calendar This week will include U.S. and EU officials gathering in Brussels for the sixth, and potentially last session of the Trade and Technology Council. There will reportedly be agreements on AI, 6G and the microchip supply chain. Meanwhile, U.S. and Kenyan officials hold...
Divergent Perspectives
China doesn’t offer the best business environment for American companies and FDI has plummeted. But Xi Jinping told CEO’s that his country will continue building a “first class business environment.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden tells American companies that they are monopolies...
BRICS Grain Exchange; EU Policy Foibles; Yen Implosion
BRICS Grain Exchange Russia is reportedly pushing other BRICS members to use the bloc as a grain exchange in competition with the West. The assertion is that these countries already control 42 percent of the grain trade. Add the new members like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE, plus other...
Factless Nostalgia; Cash is King
Factless Nostalgia There is yet another crusader against the modern agrifood system. This time it is Austin Frerick, who claims authenticity due to his Iowa roots but he is just another Ivy League university (Yale) pontificator hollering from the ivory tower. His book, “Barons,” com...
HPAI Spreads to Mammals; Detected on Dairy Farms
Yesterday, there were two reports made public of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) detections in livestock. First, kid goats in Minnesota, who were in what was a former backyard poultry operation depopulated due to HPAI. That set of circumstances created a situation where there was a hig...
Fixing the WTO; The Winner is Ag
Fixing the WTO The 13th Ministerial Conference last month in Abu Dhabi was yet another failure by the WTO. Now Singapore has proposed a retreat to discuss fundamental fixes needed to stop the long string of failures. Ultimately, the structural problems of the WTO involve one country, one vote a...
Fake Meat Fight; Transatlantic Mutuality; Biofuel Instead of Food
Fake Meat Fight Some western state U.S. Senate Democrats are in tough reelection positions and need to show their distance from President Biden. Following SPS protocols, President Biden recently approved imports of beef from Paraguay. Today the Senate passed a resolution overturning the Preside...
Policy Shorts
India Paradox: A new report using the Modified Mixed Recall Period shows that over the past decade, India matched China’s success in the decade before in eliminating extreme poverty. It has not experienced the same growth in GDP, but its programs and policies made progress. At the same ti...
Trade Negotiation Calculation; UTP = You and Me; Real and Imagined
Trade Negotiation Calculation The WTO’s dispute settlement system and new multilateral trade negotiations fail from the perspective of Donald Trump and now Joe Biden because they put all parties on equal footing. This means the U.S. loses its asymmetric advantage of being an economic and...
President’s FY 2025 Budget Request for USDA
While Congress is finishing the last six appropriations bills for FY 2024 (with a deadline of this Friday), President Biden submitted his FY 2025 budget proposal last week with few changes proposed to USDA’s budget. Overall, USDA spending under the President’s request i...
Monetary Policy Between a Rock and a Hard Place
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will meet this week; interest rates were last raised in July 2023, and during Q4 when rates were held steady markets were hopeful that was a signal that a rate cut would be coming in 2024. Right now, however, the Federal Funds Futures market...
Cahiers Redux – Politicians Recoil
The Cahiers de doléances [or kaje for short] were the pre-French revolution (1789) lists of societal complaints. The collective disappointments of the clergy, the nobility, and the rest of society too. Nothing has changed. Documents of the time cite the criticisms as: government waste, i...
Crop Program Payment Estimates for 2024
Today, sign-up for the Ag Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs closes; without a new farm bill, no changes have been made to either program. Producers can choose between the price triggered PLC and the revenue triggered ARC. ARC comes in two forms, ARC County (ARC-CO) and...
Big is Bad; Big is Uncertain; Texas is Big
Big is Bad President Joe Biden has a popular proposal, increase taxes on less than 800 billionaires in the U.S. If some people worry about politics for sale, it still takes votes. Sometimes that happens within a class. Divide and conquer. The EU’s proposed relaxation of GAEC production ob...
Squeaky Wheel; EATS Ugly
Squeaky Wheels Farmers in Europe have been on a rampage for months and it is good that EU political leaders are responding to the complaints. Squeaky wheels get the grease because they are high-pitched and shrill, but sometimes grease is not the cure and instead it requires a whole new set of b...
China’s Veiled Data; Unveiled Livestock Emissions
China’s Veiled Data Some agricultural analysts in the West have noted that Chinese data reporting in the sector can go missing, fail to be consistent, or be even outright false in order to better comport with Beijing’s policy mandates. Now the Financial Times notes that the problem...
More Livestock and Poultry Rules Coming from USDA
On 5 March, WPI reported USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released the second of a series of three new Packers and Stockyards Administration marketing rules. Officially, it is the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity Under the Packers and Stockyards Act but is inform...
Bogus Problem; Radicalism Backlash
Bogus Problem Reinforcing the problem asserted by USDA’s political leadership, the Economic Research Service highlighted Census of Agriculture data showing that most losses of farms over the past decade have been small operations, while there was an increase in the largest sized farms. Se...
Biden Dictates Prices; Dictating Standards; Dictating to Meat
Biden Dictates Prices President Joe Biden tried to position himself in last night’s State of the Union address as the bulwark against the rising tide of threats to democracy. Then he dictated to the banking industry how much they can charge for credit card late fees, threatened action aga...
SOTU: Renewing the Focus on Carbon, Conservation, and Capital Gains
In his State of the Union (SOTU) address, President Biden outlined a number of policy priorities with potential impacts on agriculture. Many of them are prior policy goals and initiatives which have already drawn at least caution, if not opposition, from the ag sector. For example, highlights f...
Livestock Roundup: Updates and Highlights
SOTU Tonight is President Biden’s third State of the Union (SOTU) address. It will be interesting to watch how far he goes on food inflation. In 2022, he said, “so many families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food, gas, housing, and so...
Food Wins; Stating the Obvious
Food Wins Commercial food workers hate fast line speeds at meat processors because it makes them work harder and reduces the required number of workers. Animal rights activists hate faster line speeds at meat packers because more animals get slaughtered. The Biden Administration is certainly su...
Katy Bar the Door; Pursuing Food Sovereignty; USMCA Expansion
Katy Bar the Door Malaysia had filed a WTO dispute settlement case against the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, arguing it is prejudicil in limiting the amount of imported palm oil that could qualify under the scheme. Brussels has pursued other ways to limit imports of palm oil from South...
USDA Issues New Livestock and Poultry Contracting Rule
USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released the second of a series of three new Packers and Stockyards Administration marketing rules. Officially, it is the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity Under the Packers and Stockyards Act but is informally referred to as the &ldquo...
White House Hypocrisy; Support for Thailand; Green Protectionism; The Real Foe
White House Hypocrisy The economy, and specifically inflation, is one of four top issues dogging President Biden’s reelection campaign and the White House has a solution. It is forming a multiagency “strike force” to curb “unfair and illegal” pricing. Most sellers...
MC13 Unsurprisingly Disappoints
USTR is spinning that progress was made at the WTO’s ministerial in Abu Dhabi that ended over the weekend, claiming progress on revitalizing the dispute settlement process, though arriving at no conclusion. There was an extension of the duty-free provision on ecommerce, though even that h...
What is in the Ag Appropriations Bill?
As we reported on Friday, Congress passed and the President signed a short term funding agreement. Moreover, that report advised: Expect a lot of activity over the weekend in what does, and does not, get included in the ag appropriations bill. Indeed, over the weekend House and Senate leadershi...
Policy Quick Hits Updates
Appropriations USDA will be open on Monday 4 March. President Biden signed a short-term, stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill passed by Congress that extends the deadline to finalize a full regular appropriations bill from today until Friday 8 March. Note, this is the fourth...
“Healthy” Food Slows Ag Approps
Last Friday, WPI reported on the status of the appropriations process; Congress has until Friday of this week to pass four appropriations bills, including the one funding agriculture and other agencies. If funding lapses, agencies like USDA will be unable to open on Monday 4 March. House Speake...
Policy Quick Hits
Appropriations Deadline The initial deadline for avoiding a government shutdown is one week from today, 1 March. By that time, Congress needs to pass four appropriations bills, including the agriculture appropriations, as well as the energy and water, military construction and transportat...
Cost of Deception; Trade and Politics; Political Constituencies
Cost of Deception President Joe Biden like other politicians thought he made a clever calculation when he recent;ly blamed food processors for inflation in the sector. As he scorned, “The American public is tired of being played for suckers…I’ve had enough of what they call s...
A Look at Low Carbon Feedstock for Biofuels
At the end of this year the existing biofuel tax credit expires and will be replaced with the new Clean Fuel Production Credit (CFPC) included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022. Those credits which are expiring include the on-again, off-again biodiesel blenders’ tax credit (BTC...
International Agency Capture; Running Out of Crap; Vilsack Shines
International Agency Capture Regulatory capture occurs when a policymaker or regulator is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency. That capture has now occurred to two international agencies, the WTO and the IEA. The WTO is dysfunctional because it has been recast as a developme...
More Subsidies for Scale; APEP Trade; African Humor
More Subsidies for Scale The Biden Administration blames large meat packers for higher consumer prices. Its solution has been to subsidize the startup of small meat packers with grants (Value-Added Producer Grants) and loans. The program has been a smashing success. Over the past year the avera...