Agricultural interests continue to express frustration with the lack of progress on pending free trade agreements (FTAs) with Columbia, Panama and South Korea. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley this week criticized the administration’s “apparent lack of urgency” in resolving outstanding issues with those countries.
An official of USDA’s Foreign Ag Service, deputy undersecretary Darci Vetter, spoke at an ag conference in Nebraska Thursday. Vetter agrees the FTAs would be very beneficial to agriculture. But in each case, she says there are other issues involved—tax evasion issues in Panama, labor violence in Columbia and automobiles in South Korea.
“There are some issues with U.S. auto access to the Korean market, and for some of our other manufactured goods as well,” Vetter says, “so we need to reach out with the Koreans to resolve that—and work with members of Congress as to what they would find acceptable and work through it. I don’t know that these are easy issues, but they are certainly ones where we are going to be putting our efforts forward.”
Following Vetter’s speech at the Governor’s Ag Conference in Kearney, Nebraska Cattlemen president Bill Rishel of North Platte made an impassioned plea for ratification of the South Korea FTA. He said it would greatly benefit the Nebraska cattle industry, and would bring an additional 200 million dollars to the state annually. Rishel says if U.S. doesn’t act soon, other countries will step in to fill the void.
In a guest editorial in The Hill, a leading Congressional newspaper, American Meat Institute president J. Patrick Boyle urged Congress to pass the agreements. He says rising meat consumption in other countries is a great opportunity for the U.S.—but in his words, “if the U.S. is not there to fill their plates, other major exporting nations will.”
AUDIO: Darci Vetter (5 min MP3)
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