Jaime Castaneda, NMPF’s Executive Vice President for Policy Development & Strategy, discusses Canada’s lack of willingness to honor its dairy commitments under USMCA on RFD-TV. A dispute resolution panel under the trade agreement has found Canada’s system of allocating access to its dairy market to the U.S. in violation of the deal. NMPF is urging an aggressive U.S. response.
NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga discusses efforts to assist farmers in Ukraine and some of the challenges faced by the sector in an interview with WEKZ, Janesville, Wisconsin. Livestock producers face special challenges with feed and fuel, while farmers also are struggling with access to transportation.
With a new FDA commissioner nearing confirmation, NMPF Senior Vice President for Communications Alan Bjerga discusses the state of dairy labeling in the U.S., on RFD-TV. Bjerga also talks about U.S. dairy’s recent win over the European Union on gruyere cheese, which a court ruled is a common name not subject to geographical indication trade restraints.
Shawna Morris, Senior Vice President for Trade with the National Milk Producers Federation and the U.S. Dairy Export Council, discusses U.S. dairy’s win over Canada in the first trade dispute ever brought before the USMCA’s dispute settlement panel on RFD-TV. The panel ruled against Canada in a case brought by the United States over its unfair allocation of quotas that limited U.S. dairy access to Canada agreed to as part of USMCA.
NMPF Chairman Randy Mooney discusses how dairy proved its worth to U.S. consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic at the organization’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Also, NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga discusses some of the meeting’s key agenda items, including the industry’s sustainability commitments and the need to explore milk-pricing reform.
National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) First Vice Chairman and U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) board member Simon Vander Woude encouraged the U.S. government to prioritize expanded market access opportunities for U.S. dairy exports at a House Subcommittee for Livestock and Foreign Agriculture hearing today focused on trade policies and priorities.
Vander Woude and his wife, Christine, operate a 3,200-head dairy in Merced, CA. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of California Dairies, Inc. (CDI), the largest dairy farmer-owned cooperative in California and the second largest in the United States. With sixty percent of the cooperative’s milk powder sold to foreign markets, CDI’s 360 family-owned dairy farms strongly rely on U.S. trade policy tools to keep export markets for their products open and growing.
“I think Chairman Costa and Ranking Member Johnson for the opportunity to testify today about U.S. trade policies and priorities impacting the U.S dairy industry. Despite all the growth and success the dairy industry has enjoyed on the export front over the past two decades, we could be doing even better with a level playing field,” said Vander Woude. “While trade is all too often disparaged in this country and its benefits sold short, our competitors are busy forging new agreements. We farmers need a proactive trade policy to keep pace and continue to increase sales to support the good farm and manufacturing jobs our industry creates.”
Vander Woude stressed in his testimony the urgency of expanding access to key dairy markets like the UK, Asia (Japan, Southeast Asia, China) and the Middle East to catch up with dairy competitors whose countries have aggressively sought trade agreements over the past decade. Vander Woude also highlighted other policy priorities significantly impacting U.S. dairy operations, including the current supply chain crisis, securing long-term relief from Chinese retaliatory tariffs, and implementation and enforcement of existing trade agreements, including USMCA.
“As Simon outlined so well to the House Livestock and Foreign Agriculture subcommittee today, exports are essential to the health of dairy farmers and to our wider industry,” said Jim Mulhern, NMPF president and CEO. “New access into markets like Canada and Japan last year was a welcome first step, but still far less than what our farmers need to remain competitive globally. The United States needs to begin moving forward again with trade agreements and other policies that expand foreign market opportunities to help family dairy farms thrive and support the thousands of jobs that depend on dairy across this country.”
“Sound trade policy that opens doors for American-made products takes time to negotiate and the time is ripe for laying that foundation,” said Krysta Harden, USDEC president and CEO. “With the administration and Congress having charted progress on many domestic priorities, now is the time for the U.S. government to take a proactive approach to tearing down both tariff and nontariff trade barriers. We also need forward-looking solutions to the nation’s supply chain issues that are hindering U.S. exports, particularly in markets where America’s farmers are at a disadvantage to our competitors.”
Read full testimony here.
Current supply chain strains at U.S. ports will need improvements in federal policies to provide both short- and longer-term solutions, NMPF Senior Vice President for Trade Shawna Morris said in an interview with the National Association of Farm Broadcasters. “The fact that the market is not improving, that things are not sorting themselves out and that we don’t seem to be around the corner,” Morris said, “really points to the need for more government introduction into this process through the legislative side and through the administration side to help deal with this.”
National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) and U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) Executive Vice President for Policy Jaime Castaneda joined members of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force to discuss the challenges facing the export industry regarding current supply chain disruptions.
The virtual roundtable held today featured a handful of groups in the agricultural export industry. NMPF and USDEC are pleased that the supply chain issues adversely affecting U.S. dairy exports are gaining broader attention.
“These issues warrant the focus of the entire federal government in order to address the negative economic effects on both businesses and consumers from these challenges,” said Castaneda. “This discussion was a first positive step which we hope will continue to drive high-level attention to the obstacles affecting U.S. supply chains and exports.”
Since the onset of COVID in early 2020, supply chains have been severely imbalanced, with significant consequences for many American industries. USDEC, NMPF, and other agriculture organizations and companies have been leading the policy push for supply chain improvements to mitigate congestion limiting U.S. exports and in particular ensuring that containers leave U.S. ports full of agricultural products.
During a Nov. 3 U.S. House Agriculture Committee hearing, Mike Durkin, President and CEO of Leprino Foods, noted that “this export crisis may well result in irreparable harm to American agriculture as customers around the world are questioning the U.S. dairy industry’s reliability as a supplier.”
NMPF and USDEC expressed appreciation for the opportunity to share with the White House Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force how the Administration can help address the nation’s supply chain issues, and specifically, focus its attention on the challenges facing the U.S. dairy industry, shippers, and exporters.
The organizations have also urged the administration to convene a meeting with food and agriculture industry CEOs to discuss how the White House and Congress can take immediate action to implement additional measures, such as passing ocean shipping reform legislation, addressing critical transportation industry labor and shipping equipment shortages, and other steps that will help American agriculture producers reach their foreign markets effectively.
NMPF and U.S. Dairy Export Council Executive Vice President Jaime Castaneda discusses backups at U.S. ports, how delays in dairy shipments can threaten trade reliability and relationships, and how federal policy can be improved to alleviate dairy export challenges on the Adams on Agriculture podcast.
U.S. dairy exports are being hindered by supply chain backups as U.S. ports, NMPF Executive Vice President Jaime Castaneda says in an interview on RFD-TV. “It is holding up the amount of product that we can export overseas, therefore that actually impacts the price of every single producer in the country,” Castaneda said.
NMPF’s Senior Vice President for Communications, Alan Bjerga, discusses NMPF’s “CEO’s Corner” for June, which deals with U.S. dairy’s growing leadership in sustainable dairy exports. The monthly thought-leadership series highlights key dairy issues of the day from an NMPF perspective and is part of the organization’s “Sharing Our Story” initiative that spotlights farmer voices and industry commentary. Bjerga spoke on WEKZ radio, Janesville, Wisconsin.
U.S. dairy exports are at record levels, showing the potential of overseas markets. But trade integrity is necessary to expand dairy sales, making enforcement of the USMCA trade agreement a must, NMPF Senior Vice President of Communications Alan Bjerga said on RFD-TV.
