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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Friday, January 31, 2025
The Senate is beginning negotiations with the House over legislation aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness abroad, even as there are new signs of division among senators over trade policy, including whether to fully reinstate an exclusion process on Section 301 tariffs on imports from China.
Proposed regulations that could require public corporations to start reporting on the greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chains would saddle producers with significant costs and threaten the privacy of farm data, according to an analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The U.S. exported about $49.2 billion worth of ag commodities in the first quarter of 2022, a record for shipments in the first three months of a year and setting the pace for what could be an annual record, according to new data from USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.
The Surface Transportation Board, looking to end rail delays that have snarled agricultural shippers, ordered four major railroads on Friday to submit service recovery plans and to temporarily report biweekly on their progress in making improvements.
FAO's measure of global food commodity prices fell slightly in April, driven by an easing of corn and vegetable oil prices, after jumping 13% the month before following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Key senators are seeking to waive rules that sharply increase the cost of shipping U.S. food assistance overseas at the same time anti-hunger groups are set to call for far more aid than the Biden administration has requested so far to address the developing global food crisis.
The U.S. could be selling a lot more grain, meat and produce to the UK, and the British are seeking a trade agreement. American farm groups are cheering on the effort, but the Biden administration is still playing hard to get.
When the Russian military invasion cut off Ukraine’s ability to export sunflower oil and wheat, it helped push “a cascading food crisis around the world,” according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Agency for U.S. Agency for International Development. Now Indonesia, which last week banned the export of palm oil, is exacerbating the conditions that are driving global shortages and price spikes of vegetable oil.
Economists have raised their forecast for farm income this year. As a result, farm earnings are expected to be about the same this year as last, despite sharp increases in production costs.