President Donald Trump wants to eradicate this country’s dairy industry, the sector’s farmers said Monday amidst increased trade tensions between Canada and the United States. “Canadian dairy farmers and their families are concerned by the sustained attacks by President Trump with an aim to wiping out dairy farmers here at home,” Dairy Farmers of Canada President Pierre Lampron said in a statement Monday. Lampron said Canada’s dairy industry disputes Trump’s blistering personal attack on the Canadian prime minister over the weekend. “Canada’s dairy farmers stand with our fellow Canadians in rejecting the US administration’s personal attacks on our Prime Minister,” he said. “These attacks, whether on Prime Minister Trudeau, or dairy farmers in Canada, are founded more on rhetoric than fact.” Trudeau will meet with Dairy Farmers of Canada representatives in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon. Lampron said ongoing U.S. overproduction in the dairy industry is to blame for the American dairy industry’s current economic challenges. The Canadian market place, he added, “is too small to make a dent in U.S. overproduction.” Canada, the industry said, has a dairy trade deficit with the United States of 5:1. The state of Wisconsin produces more milk than Canada’s entire dairy sector. Trump has repeatedly targeted Canadian dairy trade policies in a series of tweets saying the practice is unfair to the American agriculture sector. Washington’s decision to impose import tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum June 1 was because of Canada’s high tariffs on some U.S. imports, Trump tweeted over the weekend. He warned there would be repercussions if more U.S. dairy access isn’t secured. The Trump administration had said the 25 per cent tariffs on steel and 10 per cent tariff on aluminum products because of national security concerns. Ottawa has rejected that argument outright, calling the tariffs insulting and unacceptable. Canada has said it’s prepared to impose some $16.6 billion in retaliatory tariffs against U.S. goods, including yoghurt, starting July 1 if the tariffs remain in place. On Saturday, former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Chip Roh, who served as the American’s deputy chief negotiator during the original NAFTA negotiations, publicly criticized the U.S. trade actions and took issue with online trade analysis. You idiots join Trump and even Cato in not understanding the tariff rate quota game of the WTO, which leads you and Trump to think American snowflakes are much better than we are. Canada is terrible but we are almost as bad. These tariffs are the over quota amounts./1 https://t.co/yfGsWXvcaB — Chip Roh (@chip_roh) June 10, 2018 The high tariffs Canada sets out for certain dairy products are prohibitive rates which only apply to goods imported outside of set quota limits and are traded at a “very low duty,” he tweeted. “So get this, dummies, nobody pays the high tariffs because they are prohibitively high. So yes, Canada is awful on dairy, so bad they are worse than the United States and probably the EU. But we are all awful. And we are far worse than Canada on sugar, peanuts & peanut butter. “Before Trump makes a worse fool of the United States on this, Secretary Purdue better warn him that the USA’s stupid negotiators, of which I was one, knew how to impose high enough tariffs to protect our sugar dairy, beef and peanut farmers!,” Roh said. Perdue is set to visit Canada on Friday for a bilateral meeting with Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay. Canadian officials — including the prime minister — have repeatedly vowed to defend Canada’s supply management system, which regulates this country’s dairy, egg and poultry production, against U.S. demands. Ahead of the G7 meeting, the prime minister told dairy farmers in Quebec he supported the system. On Monday, MacAulay insisted in question period Canada has been very clear: the Trudeau government will defend supply management. Recent figures from the U.S. Dairy Export Council show global American dairy exports reached an all time high April, spurred because of increased demand from Mexico over the previous year. Canadian imports, the council said, dropped 6 per cent –although Canadian imports of American butterfat, needed to make butter, jumped 37 per cent. The export council is headed up by retired U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who served in former President Barack Obama’s cabinet. U.S. negotiators had secured more access to Canada’s dairy markets as part of the multilateral Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Trump withdrew the United States from the pending trade pact upon taking office. The remaining eleven members of the trade agreement are in the process of ratify the deal, which has been renamed the Comprehensive and Trans Pacific Partnership. The Trudeau government has said it plans to introduce ratification legislation in the House of Commons before MPs head home for the summer.<doc-sep>Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters. The recent G-7 meeting ended in chaos, with President Donald Trump trading zingers with his better-haired rival, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. So now the United States is on the verge of a multi-front trade war, featuring Europe, China, and our erstwhile friendly neighbor, Canada. And Trump is having a cow—again—about Canada’s system for supporting its dairy farmers: Prime Minister Trudeau is being so indignant, bringing up the relationship that the U.S. and Canada had over the many years and all sorts of other things…but he doesn’t bring up the fact that they charge us up to 300% on dairy — hurting our Farmers, killing our Agriculture! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018 Got that? The colossus to our north is “killing our Agriculture!” Meanwhile, US dairy farmers are indeed suffering from low prices, and there’s evidence of an uptick in suicides among struggling operators. So does Trump have a point—are fat-cat Canadian dairy farmers driving their US counterparts to ruin? No. The fundamental problem is that US dairy farmers keep producing more milk… … even as consumer demand for milk and related products like cheese and yogurt is stagnant. When production surges and demand doesn’t budge, you get a glut, and prices drop. US dairy farmers are plagued by low prices—in fact, for several years, the price they get in the market has been significantly lower than the cost of production. But could Trump still have a point? That is, if our farmers had easier access to foreign markets like Canada’s, could they could get a decent price for their milk? It’s not just Trump who suggests exports are the way out of the dairy crisis. As I noted a while back, prominent Democrats in dairy-heavy states like Wisconsin and New York are also critical of Canada’s dairy tariffs. And Tom Vilsack, two-term US Department of Agriculture Secretary under Barack Obama, is a fierce critic of Canada’s program. He now serves as CEO of the US Dairy Export Council. But here’s the thing: US exports have boomed in recent years (see chart below)—and now, nearly 15 percent of milk from US cows ends up in foreign markers in one form or another. And Canada, despite its much-lamented dairy tariffs, bought $577 million worth of US dairy products in 2017, more than any other country besides Mexico. In 2016, the United States “exported $631.6 million in dairy products to Canada, compared to just $113 million in Canadian dairy exports to the United States,” reports Politifact. In other words, the northern border is not exactly an impenetrable wall to US dairy products. Here are export data on the three products that make up two-thirds of US dairy exports: Note that even as the volume of dairy products farmers sell overseas has expanded fairly rapidly over the past decade—with cheese exports tripling and whey exports nearly doubling—the money the domestic industry makes from these foreign sales has risen much less robustly: from $3.8 billion in 2008 to $5.5 billion last year. That’s because US farmers aren’t the only ones churning out way too much milk. There’s a global dairy glut, and this oversupply puts downward pressure on prices. There’s a global dairy glut, and that puts downward pressure on prices. So why do farmers keep overproducing when there’s already too much milk, both at home and abroad? Essentially, individual dairy operations are trying to produce their way to profitability—each farms churns out more milk, hoping to make up on volume what they’re losing through low prices. But when everyone else does it, too, the price just stays low or drops. It’s the brutal logic of independent players locked in markets dominated by a handful of buyers, in this case dairy processors. (A single one of these companies, Dean Foods, owns more than a third of the US fluid milk market.) Ironically, an answer to this dilemma sits just to our north, in the very country Trump and Vilsack falsely claim is squeezing US farmers. In Canada, overproduction of dairy is very rare, because farmers coordinate to keep supply in line with demand, ensuring they get a decent price. A few months ago, I explained how Canada’s system, known as supply management, works, and Leah Douglas reported on how US dairy farmers are looking north for inspiration. More recently, on the website TalkPoverty, Debbie Weingarten took a deep dive into the desperation of US dairy farmers and how supply management could help.<doc-sep>Send this page to someone via email President Donald Trump arrived in Quebec for the G7 Summit on Friday morning, and before departing from Washington, D.C., took the time to fire fresh volleys at the Canadian system of supply management. The system manages the supply of dairy, egg and poultry products by imposing steep tariffs on imports of those goods in order to prop up domestic industries that could face foreign competition if the protections on them were to be dropped. READ MORE: U.S. asks Canada to end dairy, poultry trade barriers, even as it puts up its own It is not the first time Trump has attacked the system, which has been criticized even by some in Canada as protectionist and a source of high prices for consumers on things like dairy, relative to what consumers in other countries pay for their domestic dairy products. Story continues below advertisement But his tweets on Thursday and Friday included a threat of further tariffs that could be imposed on Canadian goods imported by the United States. Why isn’t the European Union and Canada informing the public that for years they have used massive Trade Tariffs and non-monetary Trade Barriers against the U.S. Totally unfair to our farmers, workers & companies. Take down your tariffs & barriers or we will more than match you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018 Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn’t tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2018 Supply management has been a target on Trump’s official radar since early 2017, when he railed against the “unfair” system and its impact on Wisconsin dairy farmers who cannot export their products to the Canadian market without facing steep tariffs of up to 300 per cent. READ MORE: Trudeau, Macron to push Donald Trump on tariffs at G7 summit Those translate into a higher cost for consumers to buy those products in the Canadian market, and also limit how much can actually be brought into the country within a particular time frame. The challenges essentially mean that there are more costs and barriers than benefits for non-Canadian producers. WATCH BELOW: Canada is ‘not a good neighbour’ when it comes to lumber, dairy; Trump administration 1:07 Canada is ‘not a good neighbour’ when it comes to lumber, dairy; Trump administration Canada is ‘not a good neighbour’ when it comes to lumber, dairy; Trump administration – Apr 25, 2017 In October 2017, Trump demanded during NAFTA talks that supply management on dairy, eggs and poultry be ended within the next 10 years. Story continues below advertisement Trudeau refused, and has continued to do so. READ MORE: Dairy 101: The Canada-U.S. milk spat explained That, he is now arguing, is why Trump is attacking the practice publicly ahead of a major international summit. “There’s a reason why Donald Trump continues to write tweets on dairy products and Canada — it’s because I’ve told him many times: ‘No, he won’t touch, we won’t touch our supply management system,'” Trudeau said during a press conference on Thursday. Months of negotiations on NAFTA appear to have stalled in recent weeks. WATCH BELOW: Trudeau and tariffs: What will he say to President Trump? 5:54 Trudeau and tariffs: What will he say to President Trump? Trudeau and tariffs: What will he say to President Trump? – Jun 7, 2018 Earlier this year, Mexico and the United States were both facing timeline pressures to get a deal done and handed off to their respective legislatures ahead of the Mexican general election on July 1 and the American mid-term elections this fall. Story continues below advertisement However, Mexico’s leading presidential candidate said at the end of April that he would respect any agreements reached on the deal if elected. The threat that a new government might reopen chapters of the deal, which had already been agreed upon, was one of the pressures adding to the race to get a deal done quickly. READ MORE: Leading Mexican Presidential Candidate Would Respect Nafta Deal But in May, Mexico’s economic minister said there was only a 40 per cent chance of reaching a deal before July 1. That means the majority of the timeline pressure is now on the Americans, and it may explain at least part of the reason for Trump’s recently erratic behaviour on the file. READ MORE: Canada set to resist U.S. dairy pricing proposal in NAFTA: reports On May 31, he imposed harsh new tariffs of 25 per cent and 10 per cent on Canadian steel and aluminum, respectively, as well as imports from Mexico and the European Union. That came after he had twice extended temporary exemptions from the tariffs to the countries. WATCH BELOW: Quebec City prepares for G7 protests as Trudeau readies for trade tariff clash with Trump 1:15 Quebec City prepares for G7 protests as Trudeau readies for trade tariff clash with Trump Quebec City prepares for G7 protests as Trudeau readies for trade tariff clash with Trump – Jun 7, 2018 The tariffs had originally been announced in March and Trump quickly moved to link them with NAFTA talks, suggesting Canada and Mexico could secure permanent exemptions by capitulating to his demands. Story continues below advertisement Negotiations, however, have remained prickly with outstanding disagreements on a number of key files, including agricultural barriers, auto imports and the issue of whether to include a five-year sunset clause in the deal. There were reports that Trump had nixed a deal reached by his team earlier in the month and abruptly shifted his priorities on what to secure from the deal. WATCH BELOW: Trudeau calls Trump tariffs ‘insulting and unacceptable’ 1:07 Trudeau calls Trump tariffs ‘insulting and unacceptable’ Trudeau calls Trump tariffs ‘insulting and unacceptable’ – Jun 3, 2018 On May 31, he announced the threatened steel tariffs would go into effect and mused about whether to impose tariffs on auto imports as well. Trudeau, who has been both praised and criticized for his lack of criticism of Trump since the latter took office, blasted the measures as “absurd” and “unacceptable,” casting them as a blow to Canada-U.S. relations. Story continues below advertisement READ MORE: Here are 4 potential areas for conflict (other than steel tariffs) at the G7 Summit The Canadian government announced it will impose retaliatory tariffs worth $16.6 billion on roughly 134 American products, designed to hurt manufacturers in areas where Trump received strong support in the last election. Trudeau also told reporters he had offered to personally go down to Washington in May to hammer out the final details of a NAFTA deal virtually completed. READ MORE: Tariffs on steel and aluminum might cost the U.S. 400,000 jobs — and Canada could get hit too Trump, he said, handed him off to U.S. vice-president Mike Pence, who said any meeting would include a precondition: a sunset clause. That is one of the major no-go issues for Canada in NAFTA talks, and Trudeau refused. Trump is expected to face a barrage of criticism at the G7 on his recent decision to launch a trade war and impose tariffs on both Canada and the European Union, both historical allies with the U.S. It is not clear how the notoriously criticism-averse president will respond. But if the disagreements over tariffs and supply management so far are any indication, there could be more Twitter attacks yet to come. Advertisement<doc-sep>
Send this page to someone via email U.S. President Donald Trump has launched his latest salvo at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the pair’s disagreement over tariffs and trade policy intensify. Trump first tweeted Thursday evening that he wants to remind Trudeau — and French President Emmanuel Macron — that Canada and France have been charging the U.S. “massive tariffs,” adding that Canada’s trade policies have been hurting American farmers. WATCH: Trump takes shots at Canada ahead of G7 summit 1:57 Trump takes shots at Canada ahead of G7 summit Trump takes shots at Canada ahead of G7 summit – Jun 8, 2018 He concluded his tweet by saying he was “looking forward” to seeing Trudeau and Macron at the G7 Summit, which takes place Friday and Saturday in Quebec City. Story continues below advertisement Please tell Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron that they are charging the U.S. massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers. The EU trade surplus with the U.S. is $151 Billion, and Canada keeps our farmers and others out. Look forward to seeing them tomorrow. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018 Trump then used even stronger language in another tweet a couple of hours later, accusing Trudeau of being “indignant” in bringing up longstanding U.S.-Canada ties whilst ignoring Canadian dairy tariffs that are “hurting our Farmers, killing our Agriculture!” Prime Minister Trudeau is being so indignant, bringing up the relationship that the U.S. and Canada had over the many years and all sorts of other things…but he doesn’t bring up the fact that they charge us up to 300% on dairy — hurting our Farmers, killing our Agriculture! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018 Trump’s tweets come ahead of his arrival at the G7 Summit in Quebec on Friday, where both Trudeau and Macron are expected to push him to reconsider his imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs on his G7 partners. It also comes hours after Trudeau said that it is “inconceivable and quite frankly insulting” that the Trump administration would invoke national security in justifying the tariffs. READ MORE: Trudeau dismisses Trump quip about Canadians burning down the White House Trudeau told Global National anchor Dawna Friesen on Wednesday that he deals with Trump’s unpredictability and propensity to tweet his thoughts by doing his part to maintain “a constructive, productive relationship… that is based on not insulting each other and not disrespecting” each other. “As one knows, this is a U.S. administration that prides itself on its unpredictability and because of that, we have had alternatives and plan B, Cs and Ds all over the place to be able to move depending on what happens,” Trudeau said on Global National. Story continues below advertisement “We’ve seen with some of [Trump’s] tweets, responses like, ‘Oh you know, Canada’s always taking advantage of us.’ Well, Canada stands up for itself and we will continue to, and that’s something that he understands.” Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "We've seen with some of [Trump's] tweets, responses like, 'Oh you know, Canada's always taking advantage of us.' Well, Canada stands up for itself and we will continue to, and that's something that he understands." Trudeau added that the relationship between Canada and the U.S. “is unlike the relationship between any two countries in the world,” and that Canada will make sure that trade disputes don’t get in the way of that. WATCH: ‘In what universe is Canada… somehow become a national security threat’ to U.S. 1:23 Trudeau on tariffs: ‘In what universe is Canada…somehow become a national security threat’ to U.S. Trudeau on tariffs: ‘In what universe is Canada…somehow become a national security threat’ to U.S – Jun 5, 2018 Trump is expected to hold separate bilateral meetings with Trudeau and Macron, who have presented a united front ahead of the G7, with the French president tweeting of his country’s “convergence” with Canada on Wednesday. WATCH: Trudeau, Macron plan to charm Trump at G7 with politeness 2:16 Trudeau, Macron plan to charm Trump at G7 with politeness Trudeau, Macron plan to charm Trump at G7 with politeness – Jun 7, 2018 Trudeau said on Global National that he was prepared to have “very, very frank conversations” with Trump at the G7 meeting.