Alan Bjera: Hello and welcome to the Dairy Defined Podcast. Here’s a simple fact. Trade is increasingly driving the prosperity of U.S. dairy. Export value and volume last year was second only to 2022. For perspective, all the increased demand for U.S. cheese last year went to exports. That’s a testament to competitiveness and quality, and also to the work of our guest today.
Executive Vice President Shawna Morris leads the trade policy team for NMPF and the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which is the primary advocate for U.S. dairy farmers overseas.
Working with NMPF’s Jaime Castaneda, Tony Rice, and others with USDEC and across the dairy community, she’s here today to tell us the state of U.S. dairy trade. And what’s ahead for exporters? Thanks for joining us, Shawna.
Shawna Morris: Thanks for having me.
Alan Bjera: We have a dizzying array of announced trade deals in recent months, bilateral agreements, bilateral frameworks. It’s hard to keep track of them all. What are some of the highlights and what do they mean for U.S. dairy?
Shawna Morris: We have some frameworks which are essentially deals still in progress, outlines of a deal, and there’s a handful of those underway still. But most importantly, across that finish line of negotiations, we by now have 10 reciprocal trade agreements with various countries from Latin America to Europe to Asia. And I’d say a couple of those in particular boiled to the top in terms of upshots for US dairy. One of those is Indonesia. Indonesia’s already been a top 10 market for exports, and that’s with our exporters battling uphill against a tariff disadvantage they have compared to suppliers from Australia and New Zealand. And another is Taiwan. Taiwan’s our biggest export market right now for extended shelf life milk, it’s a really high value product, also key market for cheeses. Both of those are new reciprocal trade agreements. Both of those see tariffs zeroing out entirely once they get implemented and a whole host of new non-tariff barrier benefits from dealing with common cheese name protections to ensuring that facility registrations can be done smoothly to guarding against future certificate changes.
So on the whole, a lot of good stuff coming down the pike.
Alan Bjera: But there’s still a lot of work to do. A lot of these agreements aren’t actually in effect. Where will we need more work and what’s the timeline for that?
Shawna Morris: Absolutely fair. These are fantastic announcements, really great terms of the deals that have been landed, but all of them are still in the implementation phase right now. So for instance, even the earliest agreements that were announced, which were with Malaysia and Cambodia back at the end of October last year, those are still going through the implementation cycle too. And I’d say probably in the timeline we operate in now, this administration seems to do everything very quickly, almost on fast-forward, so it probably feels like there’s a lag in actually translating from all of the press releases into things that are going to make a difference on the ground for our exporters.
Historically though, it’s not that big of a time lag. It wouldn’t have been unusual for trade agreements in the past to see them take a year, for instance, to go through that implementation process. Hopefully that’s not the timeline that all of these will have to endure here, but certainly I think throughout the coming months in 2026, we’ll still be seeing most of those countries at various stages of working to implement the changes into their own legal and regulatory structures so that they can actually hit go on the agreements themselves.
Alan Bjera: You bring up comparisons with past processes for approval. Talk a little bit about how you go about representing U.S. dairy farmers in this global trade arena in 2026. For decades, trade was built on these big global agreements, and that’s changed.
Shawna Morris: It’s a big change. I think it’s also important though, even as we’re looking at the new model to take stock and look backward and recognize how much of dairy’s current success, including those fantastic export figures you mentioned at the top from 2025, have been built on those prior bigger agreements. So a lot of those exports go to countries where our exporters are benefiting from World Trade Organization trading terms. Another whole host of them go to U.S. free trade agreement partners, but that definitely was a model for a certain era, and it’s not the model that we have right now. I think one of the big shifts we’ve seen, particularly under this administration, has been a movement away from trying to pursue deals that have to eventually go through congressional approval to instead being focused on ones that simply can be done unilaterally from the administration side.
We saw that type of playbook run under Trump 1.0 with the sort of targeted deal they negotiated with Japan, and that’s the playbook here for all of these reciprocal agreements. What can get done simply under administration say so and negotiating prerogative doesn’t have to ultimately go up to the hill to get their rubber stamp, too. So that shifts a little bit who we need to work with. Congress remains important. That’s definitely a key audience for us as we’re advocating what do we want to see out of some of these agreements, which markets are important for US dairy, but a little bit less so, honestly, because at the end of the day, the administration knows that they’re not having to send this up for an up or down vote from the House and the Senate. And so a lot more of our focus and attention has been on working with the administration and making sure we’re detailing out what do we want to see.
And I’d say also a shift for us has been trying to do that a little bit more proactively. This administration has been negotiating with so many countries in parallel a lot bigger volume than we’ve seen in the past through these individual bilateral agreements. So making sure that we are prepared and we’ve already armed in advance the negotiating teams with dairy’s priorities has been a focus for us.
For instance, we took some time at the very start of Trump 2.0 last year to put together key markets, key product areas, major non-tariff barriers, and package those together so that wherever they went on the negotiating drive as things unfolded, they had our top lines to be able to start the process from.
Alan Bjera: And in these negotiations, you have a special status. Tell us about that.
Shawna Morris: Yeah. So Jaime Castaneda and I from our team together with USDEC’s Krysta Harden, and then a few members from National Milk as well as from the U.S. Dairy Export Council serve in these official confidential trade advisor capacity roles. So that means that there’s been an application process and security clearance run on all of us so that we can view text while it’s still in the negotiating process and feed into that with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, with the Department of Agriculture staff while talks are still unfolding. And that’s absolutely vital in our view.
Once the agreement’s done, you see what it says, hopefully it’s good to react to. And of course, before talks start, we can do that preparatory feeding in process, but it’s essential that we be able to have these confidential discussions protected from FOIA given the sensitivity of the matters so that on a real-time basis, while talks are advancing, we’re able to react to particular proposals and help the negotiating team fine-tune some of the language or ideas that they’re working to advance.
Alan Bjera: Well, and as the person who has the office next to you, Shawna, I’m also very comforted in my own life knowing that I’m sitting next to someone who has been specially cleared and branded trustworthy by the United States government.
Shawna Morris: That’s official.
Alan Bjera: Speaking of official, USMCA, up for review. This agreement has always been as complicated as it is important. What are some of the challenges you’re facing this year and how do you face them?
Shawna Morris: One of the biggest challenges and biggest priorities, for our trade policy team has been making sure that we’re helping to drive a united industry voice around our priorities and messaging on this agreement. I think that it’s been vitally important for us that we’re making sure to drive home two key points. Number one, USMCA is a very important agreement in major part because of our trade with Mexico. Mexico is still our number one trading partner, and that is thanks to USMCA and the free flow of dairy trade that we have with them, the deep commercial partnerships that that’s led us put in place. We need to make sure that we’re not disrupting that. And then number two, at the same time, this review period’s a special period. It was a really smart idea for the negotiating team when they were crafting USMCA to build in a mandatory review of how’s this been going so far after the first six years, and where does it need some tweaking to work the way that it needs to?
And certainly some of our issues have fallen into that latter bucket too. Most notably, the dairy commitments that Canada’s made where we’ve continued to see Canada trying to do end runs around those promises to chip away at the access and commitments that the U.S. works so hard to secure with them. So the other key piece for us is leveraging that unified industry voice and working to help make sure that those topics stay on the administration’s shortlist for key priorities to address in this review. There’s a lot of different voices out there now saying, “Me too, me too. How about this brand new topic?” I think dairy’s a little different in that we’ve been consistently saying from the get go here, “Look, these key pieces aren’t implementing the way that they were envisioned. They need relooked at and they need some targeted fixes.” And so I think that that’s been getting through, but certainly it’s incumbent upon our industry as a whole to make sure we keep that message up, particularly as we drive through toward July 1st, which is that critical, “Where do we go next from here,” date this year.
Alan Bjera: NMPF and USDEC have built up a network of partnerships and key markets. How do those fit into this overall trade strategy?
Shawna Morris: They’ve been really critical. We’re talking about USMCA just a moment ago. Mexico is one of those partner areas, all told we have a bit less than a dozen across Latin America, Europe, and Asia and really those partnerships are aimed at identifying where do we have common ground and how do we make sure that we’re focusing on those areas to work together in a productive way? So some of the topics include things like rejecting anti-dairy proposals, especially at the multilateral level, there’s lots of folks that think they know the answers and it doesn’t involve dairy consumption in terms of what people should be eating for a host of different reasons or on the dairy nomenclature debate, what should be able to be called cheese or milk, et cetera.
We also partner through a lot of those arrangements on dairy consumption issues from a recognition that if, in that trading partner’s market, more people are consuming dairy products, well, that’s not just good for them, it’s good for us. How do we collaborate to help drive that upward momentum in terms of dairy consumption habits?
And then some in the trade space too. For instance, a number of them are focused on working to protect open markets for cheeses to make sure that we’re protecting the ability to sell common cheese name products, pushing back against the EU’s geographical indication agenda that wants to stamp out competition. Again, that helps them, their domestic production, and their markets certainly helps us from the export side.
We use these time and time again in Mexico, leaning on our partners there when anti-trade and protectionist proposals are trying to prop up. And we’ve relied really heavily on it as well, for instance, in Colombia just a couple years ago when there was a case moving through pushed by the government in Colombia to try to put new tariffs in place alleging that our dairy products were being unfairly subsidized, our milk powder exports to Columbia.
And so we used that partnership we had with one of their groups there to both push back with coordinated messaging and tell the truth about what was actually going on.
Alan Bjera: And beyond these headlines, what are a few of the other dairy trade policy issues brewing?
Shawna Morris: Yeah, well, there’s a host of different issues. I mean, frankly, our goal is always to be trying to the fullest extent possible to be tackling those issues, working together with a lot of our regulatory colleagues on the Dairy Export Council side to head them off before they get implemented. Sometimes some of them do though. So for instance, right now, our exporters aren’t able to ship to Turkiye. They’ve changed some of their regulatory requirements for imports. We’re trying to work with the administration to reopen access to that market.
Elsewhere in that neighborhood, we are doing a lot of work trying to preemptively weigh in at an early stage of the process as the EU is looking at what do they want to do on animal welfare and how much of that should be applied to imported products.
EU isn’t a huge market for us, but we certainly ship a fair amount. We also ship product to other markets that winds its way to the EU at the end of the day, so it needs to be EU eligible. And we certainly don’t want EU bureaucrats dictating to our farmers what proper animal welfare looks like, particularly for an industry that has such high standards the way we do under the Farm Animal Care program. So working to weigh in with EU policymakers as they’re trying to put those regulations together at an early stage has been a big focus to try to avoid future trade barriers from coming down the pipe.
On a little bit more positive side, we’ve also been doing a fair amount of work with Indonesia, partnering there with some of their industry, looking to try to encourage greater use of dairy as Indonesia has been rolling into effect, over the past year, a new school meals program that includes school milk. We want to make sure that we’re maximizing the amount of kids that actually have access to milk under that program through a combination of helping support their local production and, of course, complimentary imported product too.
That’s just to give you a little bit of a flavor of it and a host of other issues in a number of other markets. Again, our focus really is on how do we make sure that we’re keeping the doors open and also looking at some of the policy tools that can be leveraged in order to expand consumption or dairy access more broadly with those trading partners.
Alan Bjera: We’ve been speaking with NMPF and U.S. Dairy Export Council Executive Vice President, Shawna Morris. Shawna, anything we’ve missed?
Shawna Morris: Maybe I’d just do a quick forward-looking plug for the administration’s new America First Trade Promotion Program funding. This is new export promotion money that they announced that they would be making available later this year. We’re expecting decisions out on who gets awarded how much across US agriculture in the next few months. And that’s another space where we’ve looked at how do we tap into those new resources from the administration in order to help drive some of these more positive views about how dairy can play a helpful role in diets and the policy elements that shape that landscape.
Alan Bjera: Shawna Morris, thank you for joining us.
Shawna Morris: Happy to be here. Thanks, Alan.
Alan Bjera: To learn more about U.S. dairy trade, we’ll tip our cap to our partner, the U.S. Dairy Export Council, at usdec.org. For more of the Dairy Defined Podcast, all you have to do is go to our website or go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music and search under the name Dairy Defined. We’ll talk again soon.
