Secretary Vilsack on Mexican trucking dispute
Washington Ag Today December 15, 2010 U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack met with his counterpart in Mexico last Friday to discuss agriculture and trade. In a statement issued after the meeting Vilsack stated “Our highly integrated agricultural sectors will present challenges to our agricultural relationship from time to time, however we both expressed a commitment to work together to quickly resolve any issues before they negatively affect trade. Retaliatory tariffs Mexico was allowed to impose on various U.S. exports to Mexico over a trucking program dispute have impacted sectors of U.S. agriculture including some products Washington exports to Mexico. Vilsack’s post-meeting statement did not mention that issue but before his Mexico visit he said. Vilsack; “We continue to encourage Secretary LaHood and others to continue to work on this truck issue. I think he is well aware of my concerns about the tariffs that have been imposed and the impact it is having particularly on a number of our specialty crops and now being expanded recently to pork and other items. We obviously got to get this resolved. My hope and belief is that this gets resolved sooner than later and we will do everything we can to facilitate that resolution but it is not something that I directly have control over. We are just simply encouraging the transportation folks to iron out whatever details need to be ironed out to this thing done.” I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on Northwest Aginfo Net.
