Cutting Red Tape to Expand Trade
February 5, 2019
As U.S. dairy companies build relationships in new markets that desire high-quality American products, foreign regulatory red-tape has held back gains. NMPF works closely with the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) and the U.S. government to tackle these issues to ensure that American-made dairy products can reach customers abroad.
Solving these issues requires working with the foreign government to find a reasonable and commercially viable pathway, but sometimes it also involves work closer to home to ensure that the U.S. government is equipped to provide U.S. exporters with the support they need to comply with foreign regulatory requirements.
For example, in recent years a growing number of countries have begun requiring that the U.S. government provide a list of companies authorized to export to their country as a condition to keep the market open – or sometimes even before sales with that country can commence. To meet that need, existing U.S. regulations have required the U.S. government to undergo a time-consuming and overly burdensome rulemaking process, country by country, which acts as a constraint on export opportunities.
NMPF and USDEC have steadily pushed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its inter-agency partners to address this shortcoming by streamlining the FDA process for creating lists of authorized exporters.
In response, FDA recently proposed cutting through a large part of that red tape by presenting a plan that would give the agency the authority to work with partners in other federal agencies to quickly compile these lists as needed without going through the bureaucratic rulemaking process each time.
NMPF and USDEC filed joint comments in support of this approach and urged FDA to continue to consider ways to maximize the efficiency of how the administration approaches dairy trade issues.
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