Dairy’s Future Depends on Trade, and the U.S. Can Deliver

A billion pounds of cheese can’t be wrong: Exports point to a bright future for U.S. dairy.

The statement is true, it’s simple, and it can be easy to get lost in the back-and-forth of trade disputes among the United States and its partners. Those headlines will remain with us, as trade policy inevitably becomes a part of discussions over national security and economic competition. What remains is the undeniably real growth of U.S. dairy exports, and their critical importance toward building a better future for our industry.

Back to that billion pounds. 2024 was a record for U.S. cheese shipments, by far. U.S. cheese exports rose 17% to 508,808 metric tons, topping 2022’s previous record by more than 75,000 metric tons. Cheese exports have never topped 500,000 metric tons, which translates to more than 1 billion pounds.

Butterfat volumes improved, as have dry whey, casein and fluid milk. And while challenges with China and its soft economy kept last year from topping 2022’s overall record, sales still rose to their second highest ever.

Trade agreements that the U.S. has negotiated over the past couple decades have played a major role in helping lay the groundwork for that growth and last year’s milestone cheese export record.

With more U.S. processing capacity online, our cheese exports are poised for even more global growth. We’re developing and expanding promising markets such as Indonesia while maintaining dominance in our backyard, even as competitors like New Zealand try to elbow their way in to offset China’s weak growth. Across dairy, these positive developments will continue to grow. From 5.2 percent of U.S. milk production in 2000 to 16.4% percent today, trade has become an increasingly important outlet for farmers’ milk. It creates a promising future — and at the same time, it means the future depends on it.

At the National Milk Producers Federation, working in partnership with the U.S. Dairy Export Council, our efforts to unlock new markets and create a positive policy environment are persistent.

• In key foreign markets, U.S. dairy exporters are at a distinct disadvantage because of tariff cuts that the European Union or New Zealand have negotiated in their own trade agreements with those countries. We’re finally now able to take advantage of lower tariffs in many countries. including the 0% tariffs phased in under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), signed back in 2004. But that only underscores how much work hasn’t been done and remains left to do.

• Because the United States hasn’t kept pace on the trade agreements front, NMPF and USDEC have been pursuing unilateral tariff cuts with targeted trading partners. We’ve already seen successes with China on cheese, from Vietnam on various dairy products, and just last year from the United Kingdom on certain milk powder sales; we’re now actively working to chip tariffs down further with the United Kingdom, China and Taiwan. Two of my staff will head to Taiwan next month to advance that goal.

• We’re also pushing against trade barriers that are arising as countries invent new policies that threaten to disrupt our dairy sales. We’ve devoted extensive efforts to beating back a politically motivated countervailing duty case in Colombia. And, we’re focused on ensuring that currently open markets stay that way, and pursuing ways to streamline and expand trade with partners such as Indonesia, Costa Rica and Canada. Our efforts are positioning us well to make headway with the new administration.

• To advance beyond past trade agreements, we are always looking for opportunities to forge new deals that help exporters compete in targeted ways, much like how the U.S.-Japan agreement negotiated under the first Trump Administration boosted our cheese and whey exports. We’re also pushing for strong protections for our cheese exports using common names like “parmesan” and addressing the $2.7B dairy trade deficit we have with the EU.