Oregon Forests and KORUS FTA

Oregon Forests and KORUS FTA plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

The free trade agreement between Korea and the United States will go into effect on March 15, six years after the two countries kicked off talks on the trade pact in June 2006. Wyatt Prescott, Executive Vice President for the Idaho Cattleman’s Association says this is good news for beef producers.

PRESCOTT: It’ll provide us more opportunities to sell our beef and that’s the bottom line. That’s what’s driving our industry right now is just outstanding, outstanding export performance. Anything we can do to increase access into those markets will definitely help our industry.

The KORUS pact will phase out tariffs on U.S. beef over the next 15 years and will make U.S. beef a more affordable and appealing choice for Korean customers.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will apply ecological forestry principles on a broader landscape to restore forest health and to provide sustainable timber harvests for local mills and the communities who rely on the timber industry for jobs and economic strength. He made the announcement yesterday during a visit to one of three ecological forestry pilot projects in Oregon. In addition to continued work on these three pilots, the BLM will plan for least five additional timber sales using ecological forestry principles by the end of Fiscal Year 2013.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

I like eating bacon, and I’m not afraid to say it. Apparently, the over four thousand people that attended the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival this past weekend aren’t ashamed to say they love bacon either, even though there were protesters there attending the event who stood outside the “bacon pleasure palace” handing out pamphlets dissing bacon, along with all other processed meats. It’s also interesting to note that not all festival goers were members of the “over fifty” set. There were a large percentage of attendees who were twenty and thirty-somethings. In fact in retaliation, a group of twenty-somethings who had read about protesters’ plans of attending the bacon festival took it upon themselves to don white lab coats and join the event as “members of the pro-bacon Physicians Committee for Ridiculous Meat-eaters”, an obvious pun directed at the anti-meat organization and self-appointed guardians of the average consumer, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And how did festival goers react to protester pamphlets that warned “bacon can cause rectal cancer”? One attendee said that “the protesters could put their pamphlets where the sun don’t shine”.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.