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Trade remains a top priority for cattle industry

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association vice president of government affairs Ethan Lane says the Biden administration’s new approach to global trade doesn’t work for cattle producers. “It is absolutely unconscionable that the Trade Representative to the United States, Katherine Tai, made comments in the last few weeks that it is no longer an objective of this administration to work on exports,” he says.  Several members of the NCBA are in San Diego, California this week for the organization’s Summer Business Meeting to set policy for the year. Lane says members are growing increasingly concerned about the administration’s position on trade.

Tai has said recently America’s trade policy should be focused less on increasing exports and more on leveraging access to U.S. markets.  Lane tells Brownfield, “We have to trade and we have to have exports.”

In 2022, U.S. beef exports were valued at a record $11.68 billion an increase of nearly 40% of the previous five-year average.  The beef export value last year was a record $447.58 per head.  Exports of variety meats last year were valued at $1.25 billion, a 15% increase from 2021.  

He says now is not the time for the administration to pull back the throttle on trade.  “Instead expand markets for U.S. producers to export their products,” he says.  “Anything less than that is an abject failure of this administration to back U.S. producers and their ability to market their products.”

Brownfield interviewed Lane at the 2023 Summer Business Meeting in San Diego, CA.

AUDIO: Ethan Lane, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association