Trade Policy and Wheat in the Obama Administration
By Ben Conner, USW Director of Policy Next week, the United States will hold its quadrennial pageantry to mark the beginning of a new presidential term. Since term limits prevented President Obama from running again, his administration will come to an end. The wheat industry has not always seen eye to eye on every issue […]
Panic is Not a Good Strategy When Considering Future Trade Policies
By Ben Conner, USW Deputy Director of Policy On Nov. 8, 2016, American voters shocked the world and themselves by electing Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. To those who trade goods and services across the U.S. border, including wheat buyers, this may be cause for some alarm because […]
USW Submits Annual Report on Trade Barriers to U.S. Trade Representative
By Elizabeth Westendorf, USW Policy Specialist Every year, the U.S. Congress requires the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to submit a comprehensive report detailing the trade barriers and policy challenges facing exported U.S. goods and services. The annual National Trade Estimate (NTE), which came in at more than 450 pages last year, takes […]
U.S. Industry Stays Engaged in Food Aid, Development Conversation
By Elizabeth Westendorf, USW Policy Specialist This year, for the first time, USDA and USAID held their International Food Assistance and Food Security Conference in conjunction with the 2016 World Food Prize event in Des Moines, IA, the week of Oct. 10. The two-day event brought together people from commodity organizations, NGOs, government and academic […]
WTO Negotiations Facing New Realities
By USW Deputy Director of Policy Ben Conner After attending a series of World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Geneva in September, it appears to me that member representatives are at the intersection of two trends influencing agricultural trade negotiations. First, there is growing recognition that the Doha Round approach to future trade negotiations is […]
Time to Apply the WTO’s Enforcement Power
By Ben Conner, USW Assistant Director of Policy The power of the World Trade Organization (WTO) may seem somewhat dim these days. The Doha Round negotiations have been stalled for years and there are many flagrant violations of WTO rules that have been documented by groups like USW. Free trade agreements (FTAs) proliferate, while many […]
Welcome Progress on Trans-Pacific Partnership
By submitting the draft “Statement of Administrative Action” (SAA) to the U.S. Congress on Aug. 12, 2016, the U.S. Trade Representative moved one step closer to the final consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The SAA describes actions necessary to implement the provisions of TPP and contains details about how U.S. law would need to […]
A Diatribe on the Politics of Trade Agreements
By Ben Conner, USW Deputy Director of Policy Few who followed U.S. politics as recently as last summer would have expected to see presidential candidates from both major parties taking a hard line against new and existing free trade agreements, but that is the world we now wake up to every day. It has always […]
U.S. Wheat Associates and NAWG Joint Committees Meet in Fargo
By Dalton Henry, USW Vice President of Policy The two joint farmer committees of USW and the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG) met last week in Fargo, ND, for a policy update and to consider key issues facing the wheat industry. The joint committees were created more than a decade ago to enable and […]
New Food for Progress Funding Reflects Food Aid Benefits
By Elizabeth Westendorf, USW Policy Specialist Last week, USDA announced Food for Progress funding allocations for fiscal year 2016. A total of $153.2 million in funding will go to projects in eight countries that USDA estimates will reach over 3.8 million beneficiaries. Half of the countries on the list (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique) […]