Exclude Dairy From Any Trade Agreement with New Zealand
National Milk and the U.S. Dairy Export Council have called on U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk to exclude dairy from any trade agreement between the U.S. and New Zealand or any Asia-Pacific agreement.
National Milk’s Chris Galen reported in Thursday’s DairyLine that the Obama Administration appears to be moving ahead with a trans-Pacific agreement with Australia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Brunei, Vietnam, and New Zealand. The U.S. already has agreements with all of them except New Zealand, Vietnam, and Brunei and, for the most part, Galen says this is fine, but the concern is New Zealand and “its unique dairy industry structure.”
New Zealand is the world’s largest dairy exporter, reasoned Galen, and “benefits tremendously from what is essentially a dairy monopoly where one company (Fonterra) controls more than 90 percent of the country’s milk production and because of the extremely unlevel, uneven playing field that exists there, we think that dairy should be excluded.”
NMPF will take that message to lawmakers as well, according to Galen, and, as this process likely goes forward “we want to make sure dairy farmers are not adversely affected by this potential trade agreement.”
The U.S. has a trade agreement with Australia and Galen reminded us that they had to negotiate “tooth and nail to try and get the best deal possible for U.S. dairy farmers.” New Zealand is an even bigger dairy exporter than Australia, he said, “So this is going to be a real challenging situation for us. The U.S. is not against balanced trade,” he concluded, “But when it comes to this potential dairy situation with New Zealand, it would be so unbalanced, in favor of that country, that we really want to make certain that the U.S. is not adversely affected by this.”