Retaliatory Tarriffs

Retaliatory Tarriffs

What with all the talk from the Trump administration about changing or actually negating the NAFTA trade agreement, the dairy industry is worried. Idaho Dairymen's Association director of operations Rick Naerbout has thoughts. “If you want to have a conversation that is cordial with Mexico about the provisions of NAFTA that don't sit well with you, okay do that in a respectable manner so that you don’t upset Mexico. If they take an abrasive approach, agricultural commodities are always the first to receive retaliatory tariffs. So when countries get into trade wars, it is always agriculture that takes the brunt of that because we are the first ones to receive tariffs. The logic behind that is that every one of our states is involved in food production so if a country wants to retaliate against us, you get all 50 states feeling the pain when you retaliate against agriculture. The other piece of it is when the US was being required to remove the country of origin labeling on ag products and we were being slow to get that done, Mexico had already indicated that the first commodity that was going to get retaliatory tariffs put on it was dairy. So dairy appears to be the whipping boy in ag. On this issue we seem to be receiving more attention than we'd like.
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