The National Pork Producers Council is hoping for a quick resolution to the U.S. dispute over imported aluminum and steel.
In April, in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel, China imposed a 25 percent tariff on imports of U.S. pork, this past week Mexico followed suit by imposing a 10 percent tariff which will rise to 20 percent in July and Canada and the European Union have announced they too will retaliate.
Jim Heimerl, the President of the National Pork Producers Council, told those on hand yesterday in Des Moines for World Pork Expo these tariffs are hurting U.S. pork producers and he fears the issue could undermine a new NAFTA agreement.
China is our number three market, Canada is our number four market, Mexico is our number two market so you can see they are a big percentage of what we do so they are going to affect our bottom line.
We had a slight rally in our market this year. We’ve lost that rally already for the summer months. We’re looking at our fourth quarter being very devastating to us. 27 percent of our market has to go out of our borders. NAFTA has been a roller coaster all along. We were hoping NAFTA would be settled between both our countries and Mexico before this. We were hoping it would be in Congress by May. It hasn’t happened yet.
Mexico has their election coming up. I don’t know if that’s going to hold it back. I know your leader Trudeau I think wanted to settle. We were hoping our Congress would have it settled by now but we’re very concerned about NAFTA. I don’t think we helped anything by putting these tariffs on this last week on steel and aluminum. I think we were wishing that everybody had a pass on that, especially in the NAFTA negotiations, and we would have it settled and that would not have happened. That would be my stance as a producer today.
~ Jim Heimerl, National Pork Producers Council
Heimerl says pork producers believe in the President but they can only withstand the impact of these retaliatory tariffs for so long so they need quick action.
