free trade

U.S. farm leaders turned up the volume in the debate over the new NAFTA, worried that the success story of food and ag exports isn't being heard among the clamor for tougher U.S. trade rules. "We have to be a player in the trade arena so we can move our product out of the country and feed the world," said Zippy Duvall, president of the largest U.S. farm group, during a teleconference on the importance of safeguarding market access in the NAFTA negotiations, now in the fourth of seven scheduled rounds of talks.

Mexico and Canada are being "very difficult" in negotiations for the new NAFTA, President Trump said with the second round of talks to begin on Friday, adding in a tweet, "may have to terminate?" It was the second time since talks started that Trump has said the United States might abandon the 1994 free trade agreement among the three largest countries, and neighbors, on the continent.

“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.

Big Ag has long chanted the benefits of NAFTA to American farmers, pointing out that the free-trade deal with Mexico and Canada has quadrupled U.S. farm exports since it went into effect in 1994. “But despite the largely pro-trade drumbeat in the ag sector, there are plenty of farmers who feel otherwise,” say Kristina Johnson and Sam Fromartz in FERN’s latest story, published with NPR’s The Salt.

At nearly the same time Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was calming fears of a downturn in U.S.-Mexico agricultural trade, some Mexican farm groups demanded that agriculture be left out of the "new NAFTA" negotiations that begin in 16 days.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who applauded tariffs on Canadian timber as U.S. payback in a milk-trade dispute with its northern neighbor, discussed possible solutions with dairy leaders during a session at USDA headquarters. President Trump has twice raised the issue of U.S. ultra-filtered milk exports to the highest level of binational attention, at one point saying "we don't want to be taken advantage of by other countries — and that's stopping and stopping fast."

Two days after accusing Canada of stifling U.S. dairy exports, President Trump said, "what they've done to our dairy farm workers is a disgrace," and added: "[W]e're going to get to the negotiating table with Canada very, very quickly" to re-write NAFTA. In Toronto, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he anticipated "a thoughtful, fact-based conversation on how to move forward in a way the protects our consumers and our agricultural producers."

Under the threat of $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico, Congress repealed a law 16 months ago that required packages of beef and and pork to say where the animals were born, raised and slaughtered. Activist agricultural groups say a revival of the labels would be a complement to President Trump's America First policy and his complaint of unfair practices by U.S. neighbors.

In the first face-to-face meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, the two leaders agreed to a 100-day effort to improve trade relations between the world's two largest economies. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the president "raised serious concerns about the impact of China’s industrial, agricultural, technology, and cyber policies on U.S. jobs and exports."