International Trade and the Farm Bill

There’s been a lot of discussion during this farm bill cycle about the need to update Market Access Program and Foreign Market Development Program spending levels for commodity programs, including for the U.S. Meat Export Federation efforts to promote beef and pork exports. USMEF President and CEO Dan Halstrom said additional funding would be put to work right away.

“I think the potential is huge with additional investment. You're referring to MAP and FMD, the efforts to try to increase the level of funding in the next farm bill. As it looks right now, the Farm Bill has been kicked down the road with a continuing resolution for another year, which is good news in the fact that we got at appropriate, but every time you do that, due to sequestration, a few other things, the total overall budget that's allocated is a little bit less every year.”

“It's a different part of FAS, but similar concept, and what you can use it for is MAP and FMD, and we're excited about that. It can increase our presence of the industry globally, whether it’s beef or pork, we can go into some newer regions of the world like I mentioned, Indonesia, Malaysia, these are spots that we're looking to get more aggressive in, not to mention Africa. So yeah, there's a lot of potential benefit down the road if we were able to get some of that additional funding.”