Another El Nino Winter & TPP Heads Into Negotiations

Another El Niño Winter & TPP Heads Into Negotiations. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report.

Meteorologists are watching the weather in the Pacific and it appears that another large El Niño is building which could mean an end for drought conditions in California and the northwest. It could be the most significant weather pattern since 1997. One NOAA report said the chances are now "greater than 90 percent" that El Niño conditions that began in March will remain through this winter. The 1997 event brought heavy rains to northern California filling reservoirs and rivers. Cross your fingers.

Just because the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement was passed here in the U.S. does not mean it's a done deal. Now the real deliberation begins on the world stage. According to Ambassador Darci Vetter, the negotiating process for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will soon be entering a critical phase.

VETTER: We have all of the twelve TPP ministers will be converging in Maui in Hawaii, the halfway point with a lot of these Asian economies and we hope that we can take care of a lot of those remaining outstanding issues. We are negotiating bilaterally with the different members at the table our market access agreements and trying to open those markets to the fullest extent possible. Wherever possible that means eliminating tariffs but if we can't get those tariffs to zero we want to see how closely we can get and how much we can maximize our access to those markets.

That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.