ARLINGTON, VA – Two leading dairy groups said today they will work with the Trump Administration to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to make sure it safeguards open trade with Mexico and confronts increasingly protectionist dairy policies by Canada.

In joint comments sent to the U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) describe the existing North American dairy landscape as one in which U.S. dairy products flow relatively unhindered to Mexico but are curtailed by Canada’s increasing use of policy tools violating international trade obligations.

“NAFTA has accomplished a great deal over the past two-plus decades, but it has also been overtaken by new, unanticipated forms of trade and trade problems,” said Tom Vilsack, U.S. Dairy Export Council president and CEO. “We agree that NAFTA could use a facelift and our industry looks forward to working with the Trump Administration to explore ways to preserve and strengthen it.”

Since NAFTA’s implementation, the United States has shifted from being a consistent net importer of dairy products to being a significant net exporter. Over the past five years, cumulative U.S. dairy exports are more than double the import total.

“The relationship between the dairy sectors of the U.S., Mexico and Canada is of such great importance to all of our nations that we need to devote the time and effort to make it better,” said Jim Mulhern, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation.  “A modernized NAFTA agreement must preserve the open and dependable trade relationship with Mexico, and remove remaining barriers to trade that were not adequately addressed in the original agreement.”

Last year, the U.S. dairy industry exported $1.2 billion worth of dairy products to Mexico, a dramatic increase from $124 million in 1995. Mexico is the largest U.S. dairy export market by far, roughly double the size of the industry’s second-largest market, Canada.

The comments submitted to USTR say a modernized NAFTA can increase U.S. dairy exports, create jobs and build business partnerships between the three countries. On the other hand, withdrawing from NAFTA could devastate the U.S. dairy industry. Last year’s dairy exports to Mexico alone required the milk equivalent of 1,500 American dairy farms.

The document’s top request of the Trump Administration is for a “decisive confrontation and resolution” of nontariff concerns, including the removal of Canadian milk pricing classes 6 & 7, and the inclusion of Canadian dairy tariffs.

The industry’s main concern for Mexico is protecting the ability to sell cheeses with common names, like “parmesan,” “gorgonzola,” “asiago” and “provolone.” An aggressive ongoing effort by the European Union (EU) to claim sole ownership of these cheeses must be rejected by Mexican and U.S. officials, according to comments from USDEC and NMPF.

U.S. dairy companies have been working with partners in the Mexican dairy industry for years to build the size and variety of cheese demand in Mexico. The comments ask the Administration to make it clear that the U.S. is “vehemently opposed to the imposition of any new restrictions on the market access opportunities for U.S. products relying on common names.”

The document concludes by stating its commitment to work with the Administration to modernize NAFTA.

“Improvements to NAFTA that prioritize our positive trade relationship with Mexico and address Canada’s flouting of its trade commitments to us can be achieved and are worth pursuing,” the document said. “This is an essential agreement that the United States dairy industry, and in fact the broader economy, cannot do without. It is because NAFTA is so important that this modernization effort is so valuable.

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The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), based in Arlington, Va., develops and carries out policies that advance the well-being of U.S. dairy producers and the cooperatives they collectively own. The members of NMPF’s cooperatives produce the majority of the U.S, milk supply, making NMPF the voice of dairy producers on Capitol Hill and with government agencies. For more on NMPF’s activities, visit www.nmpf.org.

The U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) is a non-profit, independent membership organization that represents the global trade interests of U.S. dairy producers, proprietary processors and cooperatives, ingredient suppliers and export traders. Its mission is to enhance U.S. global competitiveness and assist the U.S. industry to increase its global dairy ingredient sales and exports of U.S. dairy products. USDEC accomplishes this through programs in market development that build global demand for U.S. dairy products, resolve market access barriers and advance industry trade policy goals. USDEC is supported by staff across the United States and overseas in Mexico, South America, Asia, Middle East and Europe.

During Walmart’s Sustainability Milestone Summit in April, NMPF member cooperatives Dairy Farmers of America and Land O’Lakes, Inc. announced their participation in Project Gigaton. The initiative aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from key Walmart vendor operations and supply chains by one gigaton by 2030. Both cooperatives will use the new FARM Environmental Stewardship module to help track and communicate their continuous improvement regarding greenhouse gas emissions reductions occurring on dairy farms.

Project Gigaton identifies energy, agriculture, waste, packaging, deforestation, and product use and design as areas in which to focus emissions reduction efforts. Both DFA’s and Land O’Lakes’ commitments focus on manure management as one of the areas to track continuous improvement on dairy farms. Other areas highlighted include improved yield potential, farm efficiency, and reducing enteric emissions associated with ruminant digestion.

The FARM Environmental Stewardship tool estimates greenhouse gas emissions and energy intensity by using the results from a dairy life cycle assessment conducted by the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. FARM Environmental Stewardship is a voluntary tool available to all FARM Program participants.

The second National Dairy FARM Program Evaluator Conference will be held in Indianapolis, Ind., on July 18-20, 2017. More than 400 trained FARM Animal Care evaluators will have the chance to network and discuss relevant topics in animal care, environmental stewardship and antibiotic stewardship.

During the three-day conference, FARM Animal Care Evaluators will spend a day with Elanco staff, take part in presentations on topics like “The Economics of Animal Well-Being” and the importance of employee training, and have the option of visiting a 3,000-cow dairy operation.

On July 18, Elanco staff will host a professional development training session to teach evaluators about their global business and commitment to feeding the world. On July 20, Evaluators have the option to visit Fair Oaks Farms, tour the dairy facilities and engage in discussion on employee training.

Registration is $199 with the optional Fair Oaks tour an additional $50. For more information and to register for the conference, please visit the conference website.

Earlier this spring, FARM program staff hosted the organization’s first Animal Care Evaluator and Trainer session of 2017 in Grand Rapids, Mich. FARM Animal Care evaluators are required to have either extensive on-farm experience, or a combination of experience and a relevant degree in dairy science, and must be recertified annually.

Twenty-five veterinarians, students, field staff and cooperative employees attended the two-day training, where they conducted a FARM evaluation. The training was co-conducted by Praedium Ventures and the FARM Animal Care staff.

With the implementation of FARM Animal Care 3.0, all evaluators who are recertifying, as well as evaluators and trainers who have not yet been recertified in Version 3.0, are required to attend an in-person training. The FARM Program will hold an additional Animal Care Evaluator and Trainer session in Albuquerque, N.M. on Nov. 14-15. Registration information is forthcoming. Learn more about upcoming trainings on the FARM Program website.

The Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA), of which NMPF is a member, is hosting several upcoming webinars about the Food Safety Modernization Act’s Mitigation Strategies to Protect Food Against Intentional Adulteration Rule (IA Rule). Offered in collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, these webinars will provide stakeholders, including dairy cooperatives, with more information about the IA Rule. It will also allow food facilities that are required to comply with the rule to obtain a more in-depth understanding of those requirements. The IA rule does not apply to dairy farms.

Interested parties – including NMPF members – must register for the webinars. The first webinar is scheduled for June 20 at noon EDT, and will review the vulnerability assessment requirements of the IA Rule. The one-hour webinar will include a short Q-and-A session. Other webinar dates are:

Aug. 22, 2017 12:00 Noon EDT
Oct. 24, 2017 12:00 Noon EDT

Clay Detlefsen, NMPF’s senior vice president for regulatory and environmental affairs, and member of the FSPCA Steering Committee and the Intentional Adulteration workgroup, is creating training materials to help NMPF’s members understand the requirements of this and other FSMA rules. NMPF encourages its members with processing operations to take advantage of this opportunity. 

Several priority initiatives of NMPF and its members won the backing of the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) at its biennial meeting in Michigan in mid-May. In a surprising rebuke to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), state milk regulators requested that the federal agency work with them to clarify the proper use of milk product labeling terms, as they unanimously adopted a resolution offered by NMPF.

By approving this resolution, “the NCIMS delegates acknowledged that states need federal assistance in the regulation of all products utilizing standardized dairy terms. This will ultimately benefit consumers, who face an increasingly bewildering assortment of imitation dairy products,” said Beth Briczinski, NMPF’s vice president of dairy foods and nutrition. “It’s time for FDA to work with state agencies in defending standards of identity for dairy products.”

The NCIMS is a national cooperative regulatory program that includes state milk regulatory agencies, dairy companies and FDA. NMPF staff attended the conference to advocate positions of interest to dairy cooperatives and their producer members. The states collaborate with federal regulators and industry groups, including National Milk, to ensure the safety and integrity of dairy products regulated under the Grade “A” program, including fluid milk, yogurt and other dairy products. When the six-day meeting concluded, delegates had approved approximately 40 of the 100 proposals offered to revise the conference’s model milk sanitation ordinance and supporting documents.

NMPF staff and members significantly contributed to the drafting of two proposals that were ultimately passed by the state voting delegates to finalize the alignment of the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO) with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Final Rule for Preventive Controls for Human Foods. NMPF has been working since FSMA was approved in 2011 to bring both regulatory schemes into one harmonized program.

NMPF also insisted on the importance of greater transparency and communication from FDA regarding its process for Grade “A” equivalence. NMPF was unhappy with the lack of details about how FDA would regulate this issue, which led to an NMPF proposal that called for increased information sharing by and communication with FDA regarding evaluations and determinations of milk safety program equivalence in other countries. At NCIMS, FDA pledged much greater transparency with the NCIMS membership on foreign equivalence determinations, and ultimately supported an amended version of the proposal.

NMPF also submitted several proposals that were passed by conference delegates to alleviate any confusion about the timing criteria for tanker washing and milk sample collection; increasing transparency around milk safety program equivalence in other countries; and updating the requirements for bulk milk transportation and the requirements for voluntary testing of milk for drug residues.

For further information on the NCIMS conference results, please contact Clay Detlefsen at CDetlefsen@nmpf.org  or Beth Briczinski at BBriczinski@nmpf.org.

Grassroots efforts to urge Congress to pass the DAIRY PRIDE Act (DPA) continued during May, with over 600 letters of support sent to lawmakers through NMPF’s Legislative Action Center – a 50-percent increase within the last month. This surge in outreach from dairy farmers was driven by a new Facebook advertising campaign (featuring images such as the one at left) asking NMPF’s online community to express their support for proper dairy product labeling.

In addition, Florida dairy producer Ben Butler of Southeast Milk, Inc., submitted an opinion article to a major southern newspaper. In his op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel, Butler insisted on enforcing the country’s food-labeling laws to better protect milk from imposters.

“People are slowly returning to real, natural food,” he said. “Perhaps the best part about cow’s milk is that it’s been real and natural all along.”

NMPF continues to publish legislative action alerts, news articles, infographics and other materials that advocate support for DPA. NMPF strongly encourages cooperatives to share these materials with staff, producer-members and on social media to garner additional congressional support for the DPA measure.

The bipartisan DAIRY PRIDE Act would require the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to enforce the long-standing regulation that milk must come from an animal source, thus prohibiting plant-based “milks” from using dairy terminology on their labels. NMPF has continued to build support for the House and Senate companion bills since their introduction in late January, including working with farmers to publish several op-ed pieces in major regional newspapers.

To date, congressional support includes Angus King (I-ME), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Jim Risch (R-ID) and Mike Crapo (R-ID) in the Senate; and Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT), Mike Simpson (R-ID), Sean Duffy (R-WI), Joe Courtney (D-CT), David Valadao (R-CA), Susan DelBene (D-WA), Collin Peterson (D-MN), Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Glenn Grothman (R-WI), Ron Kind (D-WI), Thomas Rooney (R-FL), James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Richard Nolan (D-MN), Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and James Comer (R-KY)  in the House.

Cooperatives Working Together assisted member cooperatives last month in winning 54 contracts to sell 8.1 million pounds of cheese and 1.6 million pounds of butter to customers in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Oceania in May 2017. The U.S.-made dairy products will be shipped from May through August 2017.

These transactions raise the total CWT-assisted product sales so far in 2017 to 37.7 million pounds of cheese and 3 million pounds of butter. These sales are going customers in 17 countries in five regions, and will move the equivalent of 415.8 million pounds of milk on a milkfat basis overseas through August 2017.

Assisting CWT member cooperatives gain and maintain world market share through the Export Assistance program in the long-term expands the demand for U.S. dairy products and the U.S. farm milk that produces them. This, in turn, positively impacts all U.S. dairy farmers by strengthening and maintaining the value of dairy products that directly impact their milk price.

The amounts of dairy products and related milk volumes reflect current contracts for delivery, not completed export volumes. CWT will pay export assistance to the bidders only when export and delivery of the product is verified by the submission of the required documentation. All cooperatives and dairy farmers are encouraged to add their support to this important program. Membership forms are also available on the CWT website.

The U.S. average all-milk price dropped to $16.50 per hundredweight in April, an $0.80 decline from March, as reported by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). This was the fourth straight monthly drop in the benchmark national milk price, driven by lower Class I and Class III federal order prices. The Class III price continued during the spring to come under pressure from milk production growth, which has increased domestic cheese production and stocks.

Compared to March, feed ingredient prices announced by NASS and USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service for April were lower for corn and soybean meal, but higher for alfalfa hay. These feed ingredient price changes were completely offset in the monthly Margin Protection Program (MPP) feed cost formula, which computed the same feed cost of $7.95 per hundredweight in April as it did in March. The MPP monthly margin for April was $8.55 per hundredweight, down from $9.35 per hundredweight in March. This created a bimonthly MPP margin for March-April of $8.95 per hundredweight, meaning there will be no payments for the second of the six two-month windows in 2017.

USDA’s current MPP margin forecast, based on late May CME futures settlements, projects the margin will remain well above $8 per hundredweight during 2017, with virtually no probability that it will fall below the $8 level for the remainder of 2017. USDA’s MPP margin forecasts are updated daily online. NMPF’s Future for Dairy website offers a variety of educational resources to help farmers make better use of the program.

NMPF joined the U.S. dairy community in May to prepare for the formal launch this month of Undeniably Dairy, a new marketing campaign that celebrates the many benefits of dairy foods and dairy farming.

Undeniably Dairy, launched by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in partnership with dairy farmers through their checkoffs, is a multi-year, multi-stakeholder initiative that brings the dairy community together to spark connections with consumers by sharing stories that build dairy trust and relevance. The campaign underwent a soft launch in mid-May, releasing several short videos promoting the many uses of dairy, and a new logo. NMPF has been actively promoting the campaign, from reserving a section of its website for Undeniably Dairy content, to sharing the videos on its social channels.

“Undeniably Dairy is about re-establishing the connection between the enjoyment of the product and the hard work and pride of the people who make it possible,” said Beth Engelmann, chief marketing communications officer at Dairy Management Inc. “This campaign is unprecedented in that it unifies a vast and diverse dairy industry and array of dairy products behind a single platform.”

To celebrate the start of June Dairy Month and World Milk Day, the initiative formally kicked off June 1. NMPF shared a variety of facts about the positive nutritional contributions of milk during the launch.  Throughout June, consumers will learn more through the campaign about how milk is responsibly produced, as well as farmers’ commitment to their communities, through a partnership with the Food Network. The channel will air the “Dairy, Dairy, Dairy” commercial, along with a farm-to-table profile featuring farmers’ commitment to animals and environmental stewardship.

Also in June, farmers will be featured at Upworthy, a website with a monthly audience of 20 million, by sharing emotionally compelling content. These stories include farmers’ undeniable story of responsible production, economic and community contributions, and people’s love of dairy for its taste, versatility and nutrition.

All relevant Undeniably Dairy social content is available through the Dairy Amplification Center for a link to share on your social channels (non-members can visit this site for information on how to join). Social media users can join the campaign by including the #UndeniablyDairy hashtag when sharing dairy- positive content. NMPF will continue to share fresh Undeniably Dairy content in celebration of June Dairy Month, in addition to highlighting farmers on social media and facts about America’s favorite dairy products.