Former top U.S. ag trade negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Gregg Doud, Tuesday told a Farm Foundation forum that market access in the agreement was critical. He stressed implementation of nearly all the 57 market access commitments, placing emphasis on the approval of more U.S. facilities to export to China.
“Before we started [Phase 1] negotiations, we had about 1,500 facilities in the U.S. eligible to export agricultural products to China,” Doud said. “So that would have been beef processing facilities, dairy facilities, pet food facilities… 1,500 of those. Today, we now have well over 4,000 facilities in the U.S. eligible to export their products to China.” That gives the U.S. access to the Chinese market “we never had before, and this is a major change,” Doud said. “The improvements in market access that we now have in place are going to treat us well here going forward.”
As for the purchase commitments, Doud simply said it comes down to U.S. competitiveness, a point focused on by Chinese negotiators.
He also noted the two sides spent a considerable amount of time talking about ethanol, with trade in the corn-based fuel something Doud said he believed China was truly interested in. “My sense is that China really is trying to think through this whole notion of infrastructure for the use of ethanol,” Doud said. “You know, it took us a long time to build that infrastructure in the United States.”
As for overall market conditions moving ahead, Doud predicted continued volatility, notable with China involved in the market. He said there is no way to say with certainty that in two or three years whether China would be importing 30 million metric tons of corn or just 5 million ton. The shift by China away from feeding swill to hogs is a key that Doud has focused on in his comments on China before, and said that is “maybe one of the biggest things that ever happened in the history of world agriculture.”