U.S. agricultural groups are looking for more trade agreements that mean market access overseas. Kent Bacus, executive director of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, talks about trade being a bigger priority in past years.
“I think we’ve seen a big shift in the overall government approach when it comes to trade. When you go back to previous administrations, from Bush and Clinton up to the Obama administration, you had a lot of traditional trade agreements that would have the approval of Congress, and they were negotiated by the executive branch and helped open up a lot of export markets. Under Trump, you saw a lot of bilateral agreements emerge and saw a lot of executive trade agreements that didn’t necessarily bypass Congress but were able to accomplish some similar results with a different path forward.”
The priorities shifted early in the Biden administration.
“But the Biden administration, they took the position for the first two years that they were going to step back and review. Now they’ve come forward, and we’ve heard comments from Ambassador Tai that trade agreements are a 20th-century policy and that is saying they’re old and outdated, and we need to shift the way that we engage. Sadly, in that transition, they have set aside market access, and I’ll interpret the trade nerd speak there, and that is, when we talk about market access, we’re talking about tariff reductions. We’re talking about moving those tariff barriers for our products into other countries.”
He says the cattle industry has faced its share of barriers to overseas access.
“For the cattle industry, that’s huge. When you look at before the Korea Free Trade Agreement, we had a 40 percent markup on our products going into Korea. In Japan, it was 38-and-a-half percent. In Columbia, it was 80 percent. Because of trade agreements, we were able to remove those barriers, and now we have much more competitive access to those markets. Where the Biden administration has tried to shift is they want to focus on trade frameworks, which are not trade agreements as they like to always clarify, but they focus on some technical aspects. They’re trying to focus on non-tariff trade barriers and technical areas, which are important. We’ve seen significant gains in other markets when we’re able to address those non-tariff barriers in a broader, comprehensive trade agreement, but without market access on the table, it’s been very difficult to get other trade partners to come to the table.”