The head of a key U.S. dairy industry group said last week that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal reached on Oct. 5 appears to have avoided the unbalanced dairy market access deal that U.S. producers had feared, though he stopped short of endorsing the agreement.
[Reposted from Inside US Trade | October 13, 2015]
“Based on information available to date, it appears that our industry has successfully avoided the type of disproportionate one-way street that we were deeply concerned could have resulted under this agreement,” National Milk Producers Federation President and CEO Jim Mulhern said in an Oct. 9 press release.
“New Zealand did not get the unfettered access to the U.S. market that it long sought; but Japan and Canada did not open their markets to the degree we sought,” he added.
The statement made clear that the NMPF is still withholding final judgment on the TPP deal until it has had the opportunity to parse through the text of the agreement.
But Mulhern said that, based on the information that is currently available, the TPP will receive neither an ‘A’ grade nor ‘F’ grade from the U.S. dairy industry. “Our assessment of which of the remaining grades the final agreement merits will hinge on a careful analysis of its freshly agreed-upon dairy details,” he said.
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