A graduate of Texas A&M and a veteran of 5 farm bills,
Chandler Goule
is today the Chief Executive Officer of the National Association of Wheat Growers. On September 26, Mr. Goule led off the panel discussion at the GBD event on
U.S.-Japan Trade: The Next Step
. That title was published before
President Trump
and Japanese,
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
, meeting in New York on September 25, announced that they had agreed on the elements of a new U.S.-Japan trade agreement. So, when he spoke on September 26, Mr. Goule, like the other panelists, was essentially breathing a sigh of relief that that step – a basic agreement – had been taken. To be sure there are other steps still to come. First, this agreement has to be implemented. Then later, the U.S. and Japan have said they will negotiate a larger, more comprehensive U.S.-Japan trade agreement.
To return to the immediate issue. Here is a bit more from the portion of Mr. Goule remarks that included today’s featured quote.
We represent 20 of the major wheat producing states across the country. We represent roughly 70 to 75 percent of the wheat grown in the United States. And we also represent all six major classes of wheat production. …
We’re very excited about this agreement with Japan. On average, Japan for the U.S. wheat industry, imports roughly 3 million metric tons of wheat from the United States each year. When you turn that into dollars, we’re looking at roughly $600 million dollars of sales that we can do each year, which is the primary point of this important agreement.* We’re grateful to the USTR and USDA for the work they have done on this. This agreement and scheduled reductions of TRQs and country-specific quotas will put us back on the level playing field with the countries that stayed in the CP-TPP. …
We were very concerned in the wheat industry. Once
TPP
went into ratification, that
immediately put the U.S. wheat growers at a major economic disadvantage, compared to two of our largest export competitors, Canada and Australia,
with access to the Japanese market.
This agreement will put us back on the same tariff schedule with them.
And, also, we’re anticipating a country-specific quota … [for] wheat going into Japan. The key things that we’re looking for, along with our sister organization, the U.S. Wheat Associates, was to make sure that whatever this agreement did that it would put us back on the same playing field with TPP counties. And we also had to make sure that our schedules and tariff schedules were the exact same.
Roughly 90 percent of the wheat consumed in Japan each year is imported, and about half of that has traditionally come from the United States – mainly from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana in the Pacific Northwest– where they grow the soft white wheat used in cakes and pastries. Before this new agreement, the fear was that that picture might deteriorate. Some calculations, Mr. Goule said, suggested that America’s 50 percent share of the Japanese market for imported wheat might drop dramatically to around 23 percent. The future for U.S. wheat farmers looks brighter now, at least with respect to Japan.
