Since Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s September announcement that he was ending subsidies for fuel, violent protests and an uptick in gang violence has ravaged the country. This is an escalation of the violence, kidnappings, and theft of food, fuel, and other goods that have been a part of everyday life here since last year’s assassination of Haitian President Moise. U.S. rice exports have been, taken by gangs directly off ships, off trucks after discharging at port, and even taken from humanitarian warehouses.
Read MoreThe United States will export a record $191 billion worth of agricultural products this fiscal year as the world scrambles to replace the corn, wheat, and vegetable oil it would normally get from Russia and Ukraine, said the Agriculture Department on Thursday. It would be the second year in a row of record-high farm exports.
Read MoreUnited States Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Mexico Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development Victor Villalobos met this week to continue cooperation on shared priorities including open trade, science-based policy making, and sustainable and climate-smart agricultural production.
Read MoreLocated in Port Allen, Louisiana, the Port of Greater Baton Rouge is among the Top 10 largest ports in the United States in terms of tonnage shipped. (It ranked seventh in 2020.) It is the northernmost port on the Mississippi River capable of handling Panamax ships.
Read MoreYaroslav Trofimov reported on the front page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal that, “Russian and Ukrainian officials prepared to meet for the first talks since Moscow began its invasion four days ago, as Ukraine’s defenders held on to the capital, Kyiv, and pushed back Russian troops in urban combat in its second-largest city, Kharkiv.
“In a sign of growing tensions with the West over Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s nuclear-deterrence forces to be put on alert.
Read MoreA ship chartered by Cargill Inc. was hit while sailing in Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea and is currently sailing south to Romanian waters to receive assistance, the U.S. agricultural trading giant said.
“The vessel and all crew are safe and accounted for,” Cargill said Thursday in a statement. The vessel was empty when the incident occurred, the company said.
Read MoreClogged U.S. ports are being given access to nearly $450 million in federal money from President Joe Biden's infrastructure law as part of the administration's recent stepped-up efforts aiming to ease supply chain congestion and lower prices for American consumers.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday announced the availability of a first batch of competitive grants for ports that will be double last year's amount annually for five years. The grants are aimed specifically at reducing bottlenecks that have slowed the flow of goods to store shelves and pushed up costs.
Read MoreLogs dominate Indian imports, but the share of log imports has come down from 83 percent in 2007 to 48 percent in 2018. A favorable tariff structure has supported log imports, but the poor/inadequate level of processing by domestic sawmills has prompted the Indian trade to import higher volumes of lumber versus logs in recent years.
Read MoreAgriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced plans to increase capacity at the Port of Oakland in Oakland, California and improve service for shippers of U.S. grown agricultural commodities.
Read MoreA dredging project supported through checkoff investments and a state-federal cost-share is making progress toward expanding marketing opportunities for U.S. soybean farmers.
Read MoreDairy tariff-rate quotas (TRQ) have been a point of contention since the United States reached an agreement with Canada over the dairy portion of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). And just over a year and a half since the new agreement went into effect, the United States won its first challenge over dairy.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced Tuesday that the United States prevailed in its first dispute settlement panel proceeding brought under USCMA. The panel concluded Canada is breaching its USMCA commitments by “reserving most of the in-quota quantity in its dairy tariff-rate quotas for the exclusive use of Canadian processors.”
Read MoreBetween wildfires, drought, a trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic, the last few years have been hard on California farmers. But recent research by agricultural economists suggests that economic losses to California agriculture from recent supply chain disruptions may have an even greater economic impact.
Read MoreIn the wake of retaliatory tariffs targeted at U.S. agricultural goods, USDA paid out a total of $23 billion to farmers under the 2019 and 2019 Market Facilitation Program. In further evaluating the program, a Government Accountability Office report reveals that USDA picked winners and losers in how it allocated trade damage payments to farmers.
GAO estimated that, for example, total 2019 MFP payments to corn producers were approximately $3 billion more than USDA’s estimate of trade damage to corn, while payments to soybeans, sorghum and cotton producers were lower than their estimated trade damages.
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