WAWG
From Feedstuffs
The President traveled to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Tuesday where he joined secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack for a meeting with agriculture and business leaders on the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for American business and workers.
President Obama said with this trade agreement, which spans nearly 40% of the global economy, will enable the sale more products for agriculture. Currently over 18,000 taxes and tariffs are placed on America’s products in other countries. “Under this agreement, all those foreign taxes will fall,” Obama claimed. “Most of them will fall to zero.”
U.S. exports of agricultural products to the 11 other TPP countries totaled $63 billion in 2014, 42% of total U.S. agricultural exports.
Vilsack said without question, “agriculture is going to be a winner with TPP.” Overall it is estimated that total U.S. exports could increase by $130 billion and “if that’s true and agriculture takes its historic share of 9% of total exports, that is billions of dollars of additional opportunity.” Read the rest of the story here.
In the meeting, Obama also addressed concerns that the partnership would hurt American workers. “So I’ve said repeatedly that I would only sign an agreement and present an agreement to Congress if I could be absolutely certain that it was good for American workers and good for American businesses, good for American farmers and good for American ranchers, and good for American manufacturers. We have met that standard in this agreement.”
For more information on the TPP, what it is and how it works, go here.