Export Forecast Up & EPA E-15 Announcement Postponed
Export Forecast Up & EPA E-15 Announcement Postponed plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.
2010 should be a good year for the export of ag products. USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber, gives us the basic numbers in the USDA's latest agricultural export forecast for the current 2010 fiscal year.
GLAUBER: We’re now forecasting that to be at $98-billion, that’s up a billion dollars from what we were forecasting back in August. Conversely we are taking our import number down. Imports are expected to be about $77 ½ billion dollars which gives us an expected trade balance for the agriculture sector of some $20.5 billion dollars for fiscal 2010.
An announcement was expected from the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the Green Jobs Waiver filed by Growth Energy yesterday. But the announcement was that the EPA is delaying its decision on whether to allow for the blending of up to 15-percent ethanol in conventional gasoline. The agency said that while not all tests have been completed, the results of two tests indicate that engines in newer cars likely can handle an ethanol blend higher than the current 10-percent limit.
Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.
It reads rather like a bad joke; how many federal investigators does it take to figure out why dairy farmers have been receiving record breaking low payments for their milk while consumers are failing to see comparative savings on the retail level? It’s one of those questions that has most people asking if it’s a trick question because the answer seems so obvious. Somebody is lining their pockets and it’s certainly not the dairy farmers. Investigations are scheduled to begin by the federal Antitrust Division to possibly uncover anticompetitive behavior in the dairy production system. They probably won’t come up with too many surprising or unexpected answers for this one. The nation’s largest dairy processors have been systematically squeezing dairy farmers and the consumers while they scrape the “cream” off the top. The Feds need to hurry and get the “rats out of the milk” so to speak before American dairy farmers are driven completely and irrevocably out of business.
Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
