USDA is giving a thorough examination of how to reorganize its international trade functions, including creation of a new senior-level position, undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a teleconference. The 2014 farm bill gave USDA six months to propose a plan and one year after that to carry out the reorganization. With the six-month mark at hand, Vilsack said USDA would not report its plan to Congress until it was confident every ramification was considered.
“We are going to do it right,” Vilsack told reporters, saying the task was “not as simple as it appears at first blush.” Some agencies have domestic as well as international duties, he said, so there are questions whether to split apart the agencies, to transfer them to the portfolio of the trade undersecretary, or to keep them under their current line of command. As an example, he used the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is involved in exports and imports as well as jobs such as overseeing biotech crops.
The undersecretary for trade “will be responsible for serving as a multi-agency coordinator of sanitary and phytosanitary matters and addressing agricultural non-tariff trade barriers,” says page 10 of a Congressional Research Service report on the farm law. The 236-page report is available here.
In conjunction with the teleconference, USDA issued a 10-page progress report on implementation of the new farm law, which President Obama signed on Feb 7.