January 22, 2020 506 PM
TEXAS — It’s a good time to be the cattle business, says Bobby McKnight, an area rancher and president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.
Despite President Donald Trump’s occasional rhetoric against international commerce, McKnight says a slew of new trade deals continue to give American ranchers new customers abroad.
First, there was the trade deal with Japan, which the island nation’s Diet (read: congress) gave the green light in December.
At the time, TRSCA and other agricultural groups celebrated its passage, as The Big Bend Sentinel previously reported. The American Farm Bureau Federation called it a “win for farmers,” while the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called it a “tremendous victory.”
The ensuing weeks brought more good news. Next up was the USMCA — the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that’s set to replace NAFTA. U.S. and Mexico lawmakers approved the deal in December, and observers expect Canada to do so later this month.
Then, last week, President Donald Trump signed a new trade deal with China — giving American ranchers another reason to celebrate. TSCRA put out at least its third cheery press release on trade, calling the news a “significant step” towards opening up cattle exports to the world’s second largest economy.
“Once again, we owe a tremendous thank you to the administration for their work on behalf of cattle producers,” McKnight said in the release.
In an interview Tuesday, McKnight explained why the deal mattered for ranchers. He pointed out that only around four percent of the world’s population live in the United States. “Any expansion in our market is going to be through trade,” he said.
And when it comes to trade, it doesn’t get much bigger than China. With over 1.4 billion citizens, China is the most populous country in the world. It’s also the world’s second biggest economy.
Meanwhile, China continues to have problems with swine fever, including a major outbreak in 2019. Rabobank, a financial analysis firm focused on agribusiness, last year told NPR that China could lose about half of its pork production — putting a major strain on what has traditionally been one of the country’s main sources of animal protein.
China’s middle class is also growing fast — and with it, the Chinese appetite for beef. As families across the world rise into the middle class, studies have shown they tend to consume more meat.
“We’re very excited,” McKnight said of the prospect of more Chinese customers. “For us, it’s all about moving product.”
For ranchers like McKnight, the new U.S.-China deal is about much more than tariffs. The U.S. once supplied most of China’s beef. But in 2003, China banned imports on U.S. beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State was shown to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as “mad cow disease.”
That cow turned out to be a Canadian import, and it’s unclear if any American cattle were ever affected. But the news nonetheless rattled international regulators and consumers. And even after China rescinded its ban in 2017, “there were just so many barriers,” McKnight says. China imposed rules on everything from beef traceability to veterinary drugs, which kept U.S. exports from making a big splash in the Chinese beef market.
Under the new rules, McKnight says those regulations will be replaced with “international protocols.” And without the red tape, he’s confident that Chinese consumers will soon once again be swooning for grain-finished American beef.
He points to Japan, which also banned U.S. beef exports for a couple years in the mid-2000s. And then, according to McKnight, over a million Japanese people signed a petition to remove the ban.
“That speaks to the popularity of U.S. beef,” he said.
