Officials from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. will begin a technical round of meetings on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Monday. Top negotiating officials aren’t scheduled to be in Washington next week. They’ll appear at the next formal round of talks, which will be next January in Montreal.
National Milk Producers Federation President and CEO Jim Mulhern says NAFTA must be “mended, not ended.” The Hagstrom Report says that headline on a recent op-ed by Mulhern is significant. Milk producers are backing the Trump Administration’s proposal that Canada ends its supply-management system for dairy, which the Canadian government says is a non-starter. The NMPF also joined other organizations in writing a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asking the president not to follow through on a threat to walk away from the trade deal, which is vital to the agricultural economy. Mulhern wrote in the piece that, “we emphasized that a U.S. withdrawal would disrupt critical industry supply chains, close markets, eliminate jobs, and increase prices of goods for American consumers.”
From the National Association of Farm Broadcasting News Service.