USDA Secretary Perdue Enters The US-Mexico Trade Spat

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue suggested this week that import duties being threatened by the US Commerce Department against Mexico will not help U.S. refiners. “We’re not asking our sugarbeet producers, nor our cane producers in Louisiana and Florida, to do things that are not in their long-term best interest,” Perdue told the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (NAFB) on Tuesday, according to Brownfield Ag News. “I’m not going to ask anybody to sign a deal that’s going to put them out of business, but we do want them to think long and hard about the consequences.”Late Monday, the Commerce Department set a June 5 deadline for renegotiating a deal that has suspended steep antidumping and countervailing duties on Mexican sugar imports since 2014. If an agreement is not reached, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he will resume collection of hefty duties. The June 5 represents the statutory deadline for the Commerce Department to reach a decision on the reviews of the suspension agreements.Mexico, in a response to the Commerce deadline, issued a statement that blamed U.S. refiners for making “excessive demands.”While the agreements allow no more than 53% of sugar imports to be refined, Mexican exporters are sending a higher grade of sugar that meets the definition of raw sugar but can bypass sugar refiners and be used directly by melt houses, according to some U.S. refiners. The suspension agreements call for at least 47% of Mexican sugar exports to be raw sugar for further refining, Under the current suspension deals, refined sugar is defined as having a polarity of 99.5% or above. Polarity refers to the level at which sucrose dissolves in water.U.S. producers want the definition of refined sugar to move to a lower polarity level, which would have made it more difficult for Mexico to ship standard sugar. The current agreements do not define whether polarity is to be measured on a dry or wet basis. Another problem is that there is no enforcement for violations.