WASHINGTON,
Oct. 7, 2015 - For all the battles that the Obama administration and
agriculture have waged in recent years, the White House wasted no time making
it clear how important agriculture will be to President Obama’s economic legacy -
congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership.
The White House staff seated Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm
Bureau Federation, beside Obama at a meeting of business leaders at the
Agriculture Department on Tuesday, ensuring Stallman would be front and center
in the photos.
“The agreement is so
important to ag, and also ag is so important to getting it across the finish
line in terms of getting the votes, that’s
the message that I came with,” Stallman
told Agri-Pulse in an interview after
the hour-long meeting. Agriculture
always is important to trade policy for the simple reason that the sector is
such a large part of the economy in so many senators’ states, especially
in the Midwest and Plains, and in rural House districts. And the margins in both the House and Senate
on TPP are likely to be razor thin in both the House and Senate, especially
since Republicans from tobacco-growing states, like North Carolina, are
outraged that the agreement, announced Monday, failed to protect U.S. tobacco
products from foreign anti-smoking regulations. The
tobacco issue alone could cost TPP the support of North Carolina’s two senators,
both of whom provided critical support for the Trade Promotion Authority bill
this spring. It takes 60 votes to move legislation in the Senate, and TPA got
62. The
administration, meanwhile, is dribbling out details about the potential impact
of the trade pact, which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Tuesday would
mean “billions of dollars in additional opportunity” for farmers. The full text
will be made public in about 30 days. Here’s an overview
released by USTR.
Japan
has agreed to cut its tariff on beef from 38.5 percent to 9 percent and eliminate
a 21 percent tariff on soybean oil. Japan also would have to eliminate 80
percent of its pork tariffs in 11 years and make steep cuts in those that
remain. The deal would do away with a 20 percent tariff on ground seasoned
pork. The
agreement also was crafted, according to Vilsack, to ensure that the dairy
industry can increase its sales to Canada and Japan sufficiently to make up for
a modest increase in imports from New Zealand. The U.S. industry is protected
by a range of import tariffs. Canada
will get to keep its supply management system for milk but is opening up 3.25
percent of its market to imports. The market share will vary by product, so
some will be allowed in excess of 3.25 percent, according to the National Milk
Producers Federation. “The other issue,
and this is crucial, we expect it will grow over time,” NMPF spokesman
Chris Galen said in an email. Japan, meanwhile, will eliminate a 40 percent
tariff on cheese. Japan also will eliminate tariffs that are as high
as 58 percent on wine, a move expected to benefit California vintners. To
win congressional support for the deal, the Farm Bureau will be promoting the
agreement through its state and county affiliates - a message Stallman conveyed
at Tuesday’s meeting with
Obama. “It’s going to be up to us to make
the case that this agreement is important to each of those individual districts in terms of the
economic impact and the effect on agriculture to those districts,” Stallman said.
The
Farm Bureau also will join with the same agriculture coalition that
successfully lobbied Congress for approval of Trade Promotion Authority earlier
this year. Nick
Giordano of the National Pork Producers Council said he expected most commodity
groups to get behind agriculture’s
lobbying campaign, although most have been saying relatively little about the
agreement until they see the language. The effort could get rolling as soon as
this month, he said. “The seminal
question is, are we better off with it or without (the TPP)? … We feel really good
about our outcome here,” he said. Bill
Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, said the tobacco
issue was an “unforced error” on the part of the
administration that could lose critical Republican support without winning any
Democratic votes. “That particular thing baffles me,” he said. “If you look
at the optics of it, it’s going to lose them a bunch of
tobacco-state votes.” Vilsack
said the provision was narrowly constructed to ensure that it applies to
tobacco and couldn’t be extended to
other products, such as biotechnology. “It’s difficult for the
United States to suggest that we can have public health laws on the books and
that we don’t
respect the ability of other countries to have similar public health regulations
and laws on the books,” Vilsack said. TPP
already is figuring into the presidential race. The frontrunner in the
Republican race, billionaire Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s main challenger
in the Democratic race, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, both have sharply
criticized the agreement. “The incompetence of
our current administration is beyond comprehension. TPP is a terrible deal,” Trump said on his
Twitter feed. But
while Trump’s attacks on
illegal immigration have pushed his GOP challengers to the right on that issue,
Reinsch doesn’t think he will
have the same impact on the TPP debate. Members of Congress will vote for TPP
if it benefits their district, he said. “If you represent an ag community and you’ve got a lot of pork
producers or cattlemen in your district, what Trump or anybody on the
Democratic side says isn’t going to make a lot of difference,” Reinsch said.
“Trump doesn’t vote in Nebraska. Cattlemen vote in Nebraska.”
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