Members in the News: Featherstone, Li, Zhang, Hayes, Zilberman, Glauber, Smith, Chen, Villoria, and Wilson

Allen Featherstone, Kansas State University Farm loan delinquencies highest in 9 years as prices slump By: The Washington Post - February 28, 2019 “It is beginning to become a serious situation nationwide at least in the grain crops — those that produce corn, soybeans, wheat,” said Allen Featherstone, head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University. With today’s low crop prices, it takes high yields to mitigate some of the losses and even a normal harvest or a crop failure could devastate a farm’s bottom line. The high delinquency rates are caused by back-to-back years of low prices, with those producers who are in more financial trouble being ones who also had low yields, Featherstone said. (Continued...) Read more on: The Washington Post Minghao Li, Iowa State University Wendong Zhang, Iowa State University Dermot Hayes, Iowa State University Trump Shouldn’t Settle for a Bowl of Chicken-Rice By: The Washington Post - February 24, 2019 There are other areas with potential. Removing barriers to U.S. pork could increase China’s imports by a median of $8.9 billion, according to a study last year by Minghao Li, Wendong Zhang, and Dermot Hayes of Iowa State University. The total increase in major agricultural goods could be a median of $35 billion and as much as $53 billion, they argued. Our estimates don’t even include serious moves to open up trade in China’s most protected crops – corn, wheat and rice. All three operate under tariff rate quota systems, by which paltry amounts are allowed in with a 1 percent tariff but shipments outside of the quota are subject to a punitive 65 percent rate. (Continued...) Read more on: The Washington Post David Zilberman, University of California, Berkeley No genetic engineering means people die By: Globes Israel Business Arena - February 18, 2019 Prof. David Zilberman insists that agricultural policy must see the whole picture - he even talks to farmers. "One day, when my son brought his new date to our home, I heard him tell her, 'I made a salad for you. It's organic!,'" relates Prof. David Zilberman, holder of the Robinson Chair in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. "He knows that organic fruits and vegetables don't mean much as long as they are washed, and  sometimes they are less healthy than regular fruits and vegetables. But I understood that what he meant was, 'See how cultured I am, how clean I am, how healthy I am, how rich I am.'" (Continued...) Read more on: Globes Israel Business Arena Joseph Glauber, International Food Policy Research Institute Vincent Smith, Montana State University Economists Don't See Farm Crisis By: Progressive Farmer - February 27, 2019 Joe Glauber, a former USDA chief economist, and Vincent Smith, an economics professor at Montana State University, co-authored an op-ed for Dow Jones news service that challenges the argument that American farmers are facing a crisis. Glauber and Smith are both visiting scholars at the American Enterprise Institute. In the op-ed piece published Tuesday, Glauber and Smith challenged media portrayals of farmers struggling to make ends meet, stating: "The plight of American farmers always makes for good copy, even when the facts don't match the rhetoric. And when media reports suggest that farmers are about to face a financial crisis, based on one or two pieces of cherry-picked data, farm interest groups rush to Congress to ask for more subsidies, on top of the $20 billion a year already being given to crop growers." (Continued...) Read more on: Progressive Farmer and AEI Bowen Chen, Kansas State University Nelson Villoria, Kansas State University Importing maize stabilizes prices at home By: Physics World - February 19, 2019 “International markets act as a source of stability rather than a source of risk,” says Bowen Chen of Kansas State University, US. “This is at least the case for maize.” By performing a linear-regression analysis on data taken from 76 maize markets in 27 countries from 2000–2015, Chen and his Kansas colleague Nelson Villoria found that a 1% rise in the import ratio resulted in a 0.29% reduction in an intra-annual coefficient of variability of maize prices. In comparison, a 1% rise in stored maize for future consumption reduced the variability coefficient by 0.22%. (Continued...) Read more on: Physics World William Wilson, North Dakota State University Experts talk international trade at Northern Corn and Soybean Expo By: AgWeek - February 17, 2019 Wilson says the agricultural issues are easy, such as getting rid of the tariffs, dealing with China state run grain enterprise (COFCO) and getting China to rebound back to the level of their previous purchases. However, the tough areas are still left to tackle. "It's a pretty monumental the task to sort of unravel these things like intellectual property and forced technology transfer in 90 days," he says. (Continued...) Read more on: AgWeek

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*Articles in response to the AAEA Communicating Out Strategy Press Releases highlighting: Government Relations, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy, Choices Magazine, General Media, and/or 2018 AAEA Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.