Visiting China

Visiting China. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

USDA Under Secretary, Michael Scuse is headed to China next week for a trade visit.

SCUSE: This is going to be the largest trade mission to date. We have about 40 U.S. companies going, representatives from 6 state department of agriculture going over. We’re going to be doing a lot of one-on-one meetings between our businesses and business contacts, agents, distributors, importers in China to help move additional U.S. products into the Chinese market - one that is just growing by leaps and bounds each and every year.

This past year China became the largest U.S. agricultural trading partner.

SCUSE: They jumped over Japan, Mexico and Canada in one year. We think there’s tremendous potential there so we’re excited about this trade mission. We continue to see some trade barriers that are in place. There’s some regulatory issues with some of our GMO seeds for example and the products that we produce here that we’re working with the Chinese on, currently. It’s extremely difficult to get any beef products right now into China.

Scuse says they are of course working hard on some of those more difficult issues.

SCUSE: Secretary Vilsack himself has personally been engaged with Minister Han from China to to see what we can do to get that market open and our products flowing into China so there are some issues but we are working with the government officials to break down those barriers and see what we can do to get products moving into China.

And he says there is a list of products that they are going to be discussing trade on.

SCUSE: Again we’d like to get the beef issue resolved and start beef products moving in there, we would like to get more of our poultry products moved into China. Some of our processed foods moved into China. There’s always an opportunity for equipment. One of the issues - the strawberries from the west coast. We’ve been unable to get the strawberries moved into the country on a regular basis. There’s also issues with apples. Right now there’s only Red and Golden Delicious allowed into China. We’re trying to expand that into the other apple varieties.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.