June 24, 1999

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman told the House Agriculture Committee Wednesday that battering down trade barriers in the upcoming round of international trade talks and getting China into the World Trade Organization are two key components of increasing U.S. agricultural trade.

"Everyone will benefit if the most populous country in the world participates in the new round," he said. "China's accession to the WTO would hasten its integration into the world economy and complement our efforts to maintain stability in the Pacific by linking China's economy more closely with the rest of the world's."

The U.S. agenda for the trade talks, which open in December in Seattle, includes eliminating export subsidies, further reducing tariffs, expanding market access by increasing tariff-rate quotas as an interim measure and ensuring the continued effectiveness of sanitary and phytosanitary rules.

John Hardin, Jr., past president of the National Pork Producers Council, told the committee that negotiations should be concluded in three years. He said tariff reductions must be accelerated, the administration of tariff rate quotas improved, export subsidies eliminated, domestic support programs for pork eliminated, preserve the sanitary and phytosanitary rules from the Uruguay Round and the WTO dispute settlement understanding reformed.

The dispute settlement process also was addressed by Al Christopherson, president, Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation. Compliance with a dispute settlement panel's findings "is not always assured," he said. "Our trading partners cannot be allowed to unilaterally weaken the very principles that we negotiated in the Uruguay round agreement." A major sticking point has been the European Union's insistence on keeping a ban on imports of beef from animals that received growth hormones despite WTO decisions that the ban violates international trade rules.

For U.S. beef producers to expand export markets, tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers must be reduced, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said. Also the "absence of an enforcement mechanism to assure compliance" with WTO rulings is a "weakness of the current system," NCBA said.