“From your perspective, would it have been better if the Trump administration had never raised the issue of renegotiating NAFTA?” The Bloomberg Radio reporter had to ask the question twice before he got an answer, maybe because it conveyed the uncomfortable, but undeniable, sentiment at Wednesday’s joint press conference by the three main farm groups from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Ron Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, and Bosco de la Vega, president of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional Agropecuario, repeatedly stressed what a success NAFTA has been, overall, for farmers and agriculture in their respective countries. They urged negotiators to “do no harm.”
When Duvall finally responded to the question about Trump, he did little to dispel the sense that the unvarnished answer would be: Of course. “We won’t know that until this treaty has been renegotiated,” he said. “If President Trump lives up to his promises, farmers will all be better off. They’ll have certainty in markets, certainty about where they’ll be exporting to, and certainty in what they’ll be planting and producing next year. But if you start swapping off gains we’ve made for some other business sector, it could be harmful to American agriculture.”
In a joint letter the three presidents sent to their respective governments, they urged the modernization of NAFTA in five specific areas: increased and improved regulatory alignment; improved flow of goods at border crossings; further alignment of sanitary and phytosanitary measures using a science-based approach; elimination of non-science-based technical barriers to trade; and revisions that reflect technological advances since implementation, such as digital trade.
For instance, Bonnett mentioned the need to harmonize the approval of pesticides and herbicides among the three countries, and to expedite border crossings, especially for shipments of perishable goods. “These kinds of things would streamline costs for producers and for the consumers of those products,” he said. “It goes back to the theory of building on what is working.”
Such a tweaking-at-the-margins approach was noticeably contradicted in opening remarks made by U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer as the renegotiating process got underway in Washington. “We feel that NAFTA has fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement,” Lighthizer said. “I want to be clear that he [Trump] is not interested in a mere tweaking of a few provisions and a couple of updated chapters.”
Trump came into office bellowing about how unfair NAFTA was to the United States, and is especially focused on reducing America’s trade deficit with both Mexico ($63.2 billion last year) and Canada ($11 billion). Duvall and his counterparts, though, were quick to note that trade among the three countries is much more balanced in agriculture than in other sectors. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico grew 350 percent under NAFTA, from just $9 billion in 1993 to $41 billion in 2014.
Duvall, Bonnett, and De la Vega avoided detailed discussions of areas of disagreement over agriculture policy. When asked about Canada’s supply management system, which protects farmers by tightly controlling imports, pricing, and production and which U.S. dairy farmers say is protectionist, Bonnett said: “Our government has been very clear that it is going to defend it, and we stand behind them on that. But this meeting was about unity, and we decided to focus on areas where we are in agreement. We could all find areas where we have friction, and that’s fine as long as we have a healthy discussion around those differences.”