WASHINGTON, Oct. 19, 2016 - The third and final presidential
debate this year is set for tonight in Las Vegas. Donald Trump badly needs to
use the debate to reset the race and regain the momentum over the past two
weeks. The topics are supposed to include the Supreme Court as well as
immigration policy, an issue that has received little attention in the first
two debates.
But when it comes to food and agricultural policy, the most interesting debate
probably won’t be in Las Vegas but in the nation’s capital today.
Trump’s top agricultural advisers, Sam
Clovis and Nebraska agribusinessman
Charles Herbster, will be representing the candidate at a forum this
morning sponsored by the Farm Foundation at the National Press Club. Herbster
chairs the Trump agricultural council that includes producers, industry trade
officials and many GOP governors and agriculture commissioners.
Representing Hillary Clinton will be Kathleen Merrigan, who served as deputy
agriculture secretary during President Obama’s first term. Merrigan is now a
professor of public policy at The George Washington University and is a
co-chair of AGree, a group formed to forge bipartisan solutions to critical
farm policy issues.
The forum starts at 8 a.m. EST. There will be a live audio cast of the event,
and a recording is expected to be available later at the Farm Foundation
web site.
Produce chief, Vilsack among invitees to final state dinner. Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack and Cathy Burns, the president of the Produce Marketing
Association, were on the guest list for President Obama’s final state dinner
last night with the prime minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi.
Other guests included Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Ertharin Cousin,
executive director of the UN World Food Program, which has its headquarters in
Rome.
The menu for
the White House lawn event featured a number of ingredients from Michelle
Obama’s last harvest from the White House Kitchen Garden, including eggplant,
basil, tomatoes and rosemary. The main course - prime beef tenderloin - most
certainly didn’t originate on the White House lawn.
Vilsack’s ‘food group.’ Vilsack’s name surfaced in the latest round of
hacked emails from Wikileaks. In one of the emails, Clinton’s
campaign chairman, John Podesta, forwarded a list of 38 possible vice
presidential candidates organized by gender, profession and ethnicity, or as
Podesta put it, “food groups.”
Vilsack’s “food group” was a collection of white, male office holders that
included Clinton’s eventual choice for VP, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.
Ryan blasts Obama for easing restrictions on Cuba. House Speaker Paul Ryan
says the Obama administration’s latest move to ease trade restrictions with
Cuba is just another effort to appease an oppressive regime. The
latest regulatory changes, which took effect Monday, will make it easier to sell farm equipment and pesticides to Cuba and end a 180-day
waiting period for foreign ships returning to the U.S. after visiting Cuba.
In a statement, Ryan says Obama’s latest move “will only help
finance the Castros’ grip on power and jeopardize the intellectual property
rights of American businesses. As the past two years of normalizing relations
have only emboldened the regime at the expense of the Cuban people, I fully
intend to maintain our embargo on Cuba.”
The biggest obstacle to farm exports to Cuba is still the requirement that
Cuban importers pay cash up front. Farm groups have been hoping that Congress
could act during the upcoming lame duck session to end that restriction.
Russian conflict takes toll on Ukrainian dairy farmers. Dairy production
and exports are turning out to be another casualty of war in eastern Ukraine.
Not only did the Russian demand for Ukrainian dairy products dry up, but Russia
is also blocking the country’s shipments to other countries, according to
USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.
“Once significant, the Russian cheese market remains closed for Ukrainian
products since August 2014,” FAS says in its report. Ukraine has so far
been unsuccessful in finding new markets for its cheese, butter or whole dairy
products.
Size may matter - when it comes to spices. A federal judge is allowing a
lawsuit to proceed against spice giant McCormick over its container
practices.
Watkins Inc., a competing company based in Winona, Minn., has alleged that
early last year, McCormick started reducing the amount of black pepper in its
containers by about 25 percent without changing the size of the containers.
That’s a practice known as "slack-filling."
U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle rejected
McCormick’s motion to dismiss the claims against it. The company's
insistence that the size of its containers doesn’t constitute advertising
or promotion "defies common sense and the law," the judge says
in her decision.
Putting China trade case in perspective. During a speech
this week in Geneva, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman used a stark
comparison to make a point about the significance of the U.S. trade case
against China’s commodity subsidies. The U.S. claims that China is spending
$100 billion over its WTO limits.
“Think about that for a minute: $100 billion is more than the GDP of 130
countries,” Froman said. “How can we have a serious conversation about
distortions to global agricultural trade if we pretend that trade-distortive
subsidies at this level don't exist?
Meet the Farmhand. Agri-Pulse’s Spencer Chase interviews
lobbyist Mike Torrey about his career in Washington. Torrey credits
former Senate majority leader Bob Dole with the large contingent of fellow
Kansans in Washington ag circles.
Bill Tomson and Steve Davies contributed to this report.
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