THE BIG PICTURE
not. According to Pulse Atlas data, U.S. navy bean acres dropped by 20 thousand YoY, although Great Northerns were slightly up 0 by around 10 thousand. Was there no appetite for upscaling? "The problem is that white beans are less liquid – you can sell a black bean any day of the week, but sometimes you can't give white beans away," says Sam Peck. "It's not really the farmers not wanting to plant them, it’s the processors saying 'we're not going to sell you seed because we can't move it.' For U.S. navies, the big companies are aligned with the canners. If you aren’t in that alignment, there isn't a whole lot of liquidity for white beans." Recently, both Argentina and the U.S. have ceded ground to Egypt in white bean markets in the European Union (EU); the former due to poor output and the latter due to high EU tariffs on U.S. beans. The tariffs have priced out American white beans, and even though Egyptian alubias
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