Move toward tearing up 16-year US-Mexico tomato trade pact gets bad reviews The US Commerce Department’s September 27 preliminary decision to end a trade pact governing the price of tomatoes exported by Mexico to the US has drawn criticism up and down the supply...
Western Digital aims to get some hard disk drive production out of Thailand A new report from IHS iSuppli finds the global hard disk drive (HDD) industry fully recovered a year after flooding halted production in Thailand. Not only are HDD shipments forecast to reach...
Speculative rumors produce real increases, although not nearly as big as 2003 Last month, a flurry of headlines, starting with a report in the UK’s Telegraph, warned that the wholesale price of vanilla was set to rise sharply – adding as much as 10% to the retail...
Fair trade coffee gains ground among fine, specialty brews As Bill Armbruster notes in Fair Trade: Sustainable Trend?, imported coffee accounted for 78% of all the fair trade premiums paid by US companies in 2011. Fair Trade USA reports that 2011 was a banner year for...
Consumers are willing, but divorce divides the movement by Bill Armbruster, blog anchor Poverty has historically been the lot of small-holding farmers in developing countries. The fair trade movement seeks to change that by appealing to global consumers to pay a...
Each recognizes the other’s certification, opens market to imports The US and European Commission have reached an agreement that, in recognizing the equivalence of their organic certification programs, will open their markets to each other’s organic products effective...
Top product searches of our import data focus on refrigerants The most frequent product search of Datamyne’s US import data in December was for R134a (a.k.a. hydrofluorocarbon-134A, or HFC-134a, or 1,1,1,2–tetrafluoroethane), a refrigerant used in most car air...
FDA testing orange juice import shipments The Wall Street Journal reports that the Food and Drug Administration is testing inbound orange juice shipments at US ports for a fungicide, carbendazim, that has been found in brand-name juice products sold in the States. The...
No December shipments of HDDs to US from top exporters Comparison of US waterborne import data from November 2010 with November 2011 indicates a 6.3% drop in trade volumes from Thailand – providing a partial measure of the damage done by the flooding of the country’s...
Trade data shows who really delivered toys to US kids Forget the North Pole. Most toys under the Christmas tree – or bestowed on US children any time of year for whatever reason – are made in China and delivered by container ships. Based on the volumes from Datamyne’s...
