Maintaining and Expanding Market Access Critical to U.S. Pork Producers

The Vice President of International Affairs with the National Pork Producers Council says achieving new trade agreements that include market access remains one of the organization's top priorities.
In 2021 the U.S. exported 8.1 billion dollars worth of pork and pork products to more than 100 countries.
Maria Zieba, the Vice President of International Affairs with the National Pork Producers Council, told those on hand for World Pork Expo earlier this month the U.S. pork sector exports 30 percent of its production so it's really important to maintain and expand market access.

Clip-Maria Zieba-National Pork Producers Council:
We actually export more pork to the 20 countries with which we have a free trade agreement than the rest of the world combined.
So, it's very important for us to be able to expand markets in Asia, southeast Asia particularly.
There's been a number of tariff reductions over the last few years in places like the Philippines and Vietnam.
Unfortunately, those aren't permanent and we do not have a free trade agreement with those countries.
For us trade is vitally important for the success of our industry.
Last year 63 dollars can be directly tied back to the average price of a hog so it's really important for us to maintain markets but also expand upon them.
Things fall into three buckets.
One, maintaining the market access that we have.
There's a lot of countries that like to claw things back.
Two, making sure that the administration is negotiating better market access for our producers in a permanent fashion.
Then three, we need to prevent foreign animal diseases from reaching our shores because that would certainly close our markets for at least a little bit until we got things sorted.

Zieba calls on the Biden administration to negotiate trade agreements that include market access.
She says U.S. pork producers would love to be included in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and she notes the U.S. still faces a 25 percent retaliatory duty on products exported to China.