By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Several, but not all, farm organizations are encouraging the Obama administration and Congress to implement the Korea, Panama and Colombia Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). These were negotiated three years ago but have not been passed.

The National Corn Growers Assoc. (NCGA), National Cattlemen’s Beef Assoc. (NCBA), Farm Bureau and others say the pending trade agreements are long overdue. The National Farmers Union (NFU), however, does not support the agreements.

Passing the FTAs would gain about $50 million of additional trade for Ohio agriculture, said Adam Sharp, Ohio Farm Bureau’s senior director of National Affairs. “That’s in things such as corn, wheat, soybeans, pork, beef, poultry, our major commodities, so it does mean a lot,” Sharp said. “It also means new jobs in Ohio and retaining the jobs we already have for food processing and many other areas.”

The trade agreements include processed food, and those jobs are located in urban areas and so the FTAs would provide a boost for them, too, Sharp said.
“With each of those countries, for many years through various treaties, we have eliminated or vastly reduced their tariffs for agricultural products coming into the United States,” he said. “This is what these agreements will do for U.S. agricultural products moving there; it levels the playing field of trade between our countries.”

All three of those countries have high tariffs, said Bill Donald, president of NCBA. South Korea has a 40 percent tariff, Panama has a 30 percent tariff and Columbia has an 80 percent tariff on the products the U.S. ships there.
“These trade agreements will eliminate those tariffs,” Donald said. “Some instantaneously, as in the prime and beef markets in Columbia and Panama, and the rest will be phased out over a 15-year period.”

Last year the U.S. shipped about $500 million in beef to South Korea, Donald said. That could go up possibly to $1 billion with removal of the tariffs. Columbia received about $750,000 in U.S. beef; that country has an 80 percent tariff.

“We find it very frustrating that at this point both the president and Congress have said we have to pass these free trade agreements, and now the president has said that the Trade Adjustment Authority has to be part of this,” Donald said.

“I hope it isn’t going to be politics as usual. For every billion dollars that we increase trade, it creates 9,000 new jobs in this country. We have the opportunity to expand jobs in this country and get us out of this recession.”
NCGA First Vice President Garry Niemeyer said corn exports to Panama peaked in 2008 and have since decreased by 20 percent.

“If the United States fails to capture the opportunities in the Panama trade promotion agreement, our share of Panama’s market will continue to plummet,” Niemeyer said.

The NFU does not support the three FTAs in their current format, said Ohio Farmers Union President Roger Wise. “They allow for food imports that don’t necessarily meet U.S. standards,” he said. “The financial markets in these countries – they manipulate their currency and we really oppose that.”
Other countries use Value Added Taxes and the U.S. does not, Wise said. That gives those countries an unfair advantage and, he said, needs to be reconciled before the U.S. enters into these trade agreements.

Also, these three countries don’t abide by the same labor standards as the U.S. That’s not a good deal for agriculture or trade, Wise said.

“We need to revisit these trade agreements,” he said. “If we can’t compete on a level playing field with respect to current labor and environmental and those types of things, we feel that agriculture and the American public are going to get a raw deal.”

Twenty-five bipartisan governors signed a letter to President Obama urging passage of the FTAs. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was one of the 25 who signed the letter. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio did not.