Farmscape for November 13, 2014

The National Pork Producers Council is calling on Congress to head off the introduction of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products shipped into Canada and Mexico.
In October the World Trade Organization ruled changes introduced to U.S. Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling in May 2013 failed to bring the law into compliance with U.S. international trade obligations.
The U.S. has one final opportunity to appeal before Canada and Mexico will have the authority to apply to impose retaliatory tariffs on imported U.S. products.
Dave Warner, the director of communications with the National Pork Producers Council, says the law has hurt American pork producers as well as those in Canada and Mexico.

Clip-Dave Warner-National Pork Producers Council:
The law is the law and when it became law we urged our hog farmers to comply with it but the rule implementing the law has been the problem.
The initial rule that USDA wrote, we had some flexibility in that rule and even that rule the WTO found wasn't compliant with international trade obligations so it sent USDA back to the drawing board.
That's the rule that came out last May and took effect last November, almost a year ago.
NPPC and many others in the agriculture community felt that that rule was more restrictive than the previous rule.
We were pretty sure that the WTO would find this rule also non-compliant, which it did.
USDA has now had two cracks at it.
We think this now needs a legislated fix and we're hoping Congress will do that.

Warner says at some point the Canadians and Mexicans will ask the WTO for permission to apply retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products going into Canada and Mexico.
He suggests that would hurt U.S. jobs and the U.S. economy and must be avoided.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council