Most Apparent Solution; Future is Biotech
Most Apparent Solution The EU’s organic sector wants the bloc’s officials to take more action to ensure they achieve the target of 25 percent of agricultural output being organic by 2030. Specifically, they want a campaign to increase consumer demand for organic food so that organic...
Reigniting a Transatlantic Deal; Indian Powerhouse; “Barons” is Bombastic
Reigniting a Transatlantic Deal Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta is something of a policy rock star after authoring a report on the future strategy for the EU. Most of the 146-page report focuses on strengthening the EU’s internal Single Market but, buried at the end of th...
Hecho en Mexico; Radical for Small; Impeach Tai?
Hecho en Mexico While outgoing Mexican president and populist AMLO tries to shutdown American farmers, the U.S. government just keeps giving to Mexico. The de minimis duty is about to go away. The personal free import allowance is complex. Most American citizens reentering the country think of...
Trading Waste; Ottawa versus Manila; Politician’s Lag
Trading Waste Rich Westerners consumed so much plastic that even though landfills take much of it, their export of plastic waste now overwhelms Asia. Then Western policymakers gave yellow grease (used cooking oil) a very low carbon score for use as energy since it is a form of recycling. With h...
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...
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...
Commodity Trading Earns
Last year, the value of oil, energy, and agricultural commodities all fell. This caused reduced earnings at some large trading firms but, according to McKinsey, overall earnings in the sector rise at an average 1.5 percent per year and reached $104 billion last year. The value was sufficient to...
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...
Job Data from March
The March labor market report was released last week, and both the report and the revisions for prior months were positive news on the employment front. However, those holding out for a cut in interest rates may have to be more patient after the strong jobs numbers. Nonfarm payrolls rose...
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...
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...
Debt Burden Impacts
Equities closed mixed for the day with gold up another 1.5 percent, the dollar down, oil and corn ended higher. Some large market players are concerned that going into this year’s U.S. elections, both major political parties are ignoring the rising national debt. Treasury Secretary Janet...
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...
Revising Down the Economy
We’ve now had a couple of months in 2024 where economic report revisions have come in, and they have been significant. This has changed the outlook on the economy from bullish during the last part of 2023 and January, to now being more uncertain. First, the February payroll report s...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Most Apparent Solution; Future is Biotech
Most Apparent Solution The EU’s organic sector wants the bloc’s officials to take more action to ensure they achieve the target of 25 percent of agricultural output being organic by 2030. Specifically, they want a campaign to increase consumer demand for organic food so that organic...
Reigniting a Transatlantic Deal; Indian Powerhouse; “Barons” is Bombastic
Reigniting a Transatlantic Deal Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta is something of a policy rock star after authoring a report on the future strategy for the EU. Most of the 146-page report focuses on strengthening the EU’s internal Single Market but, buried at the end of th...
Hecho en Mexico; Radical for Small; Impeach Tai?
Hecho en Mexico While outgoing Mexican president and populist AMLO tries to shutdown American farmers, the U.S. government just keeps giving to Mexico. The de minimis duty is about to go away. The personal free import allowance is complex. Most American citizens reentering the country think of...
Trading Waste; Ottawa versus Manila; Politician’s Lag
Trading Waste Rich Westerners consumed so much plastic that even though landfills take much of it, their export of plastic waste now overwhelms Asia. Then Western policymakers gave yellow grease (used cooking oil) a very low carbon score for use as energy since it is a form of recycling. With h...
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...
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...
Commodity Trading Earns
Last year, the value of oil, energy, and agricultural commodities all fell. This caused reduced earnings at some large trading firms but, according to McKinsey, overall earnings in the sector rise at an average 1.5 percent per year and reached $104 billion last year. The value was sufficient to...
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...
Job Data from March
The March labor market report was released last week, and both the report and the revisions for prior months were positive news on the employment front. However, those holding out for a cut in interest rates may have to be more patient after the strong jobs numbers. Nonfarm payrolls rose...
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...
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...
Debt Burden Impacts
Equities closed mixed for the day with gold up another 1.5 percent, the dollar down, oil and corn ended higher. Some large market players are concerned that going into this year’s U.S. elections, both major political parties are ignoring the rising national debt. Treasury Secretary Janet...
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...
Revising Down the Economy
We’ve now had a couple of months in 2024 where economic report revisions have come in, and they have been significant. This has changed the outlook on the economy from bullish during the last part of 2023 and January, to now being more uncertain. First, the February payroll report s...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...