Aug 12, 2024Idaho to be stage for next round of US/Japanese discussions
Idaho will be the site of the annual bilateral meeting between U.S. and Japanese agricultural officials, with ongoing efforts to open the Japanese market to U.S. fresh potatoes likely to be a main discussion point.
Representatives from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries (MAFF) will meet in Idaho Falls the week of Sept. 16.
The talks follow last September’s plant health meetings in Tokyo, where National Potato Council CEO Kam Quarles served as a technical expert.
Though he takes heart from the location of this year’s gathering, in the country’s top potato-producing state, Quarles is not optimistic that progress will be made in a decades-long dispute that began when the U.S. requested access for fresh (or table stock) potatoes 30 years ago. The request was elevated to a top priority during U.S.-Japan plant health negotiations in 2019.
“Given all of the focus that’s on the fresh potato access issue, we and a number of others were encouraging (MAFF officials) to come to one of the major production areas,” Quarles told Spudman on Aug. 12. “I think it reflects how important this access issue is for the U.S.
“It’s effectively been stalled for a number of years. We are very hopeful that something can break loose here. It’s going to take concerted pressure from the Administration as well as Congress, and obviously industry is going to be there pushing. But there is a tremendous amount of opposition internally in Japan to honoring this request.”
That opposition comes from a small but politically powerful domestic potato industry in a country that imports no fresh potatoes and allows chipping potatoes to be imported on a limited basis, Quarles said.
“No fresh potatoes can be sold at retail (or) used in restaurants. It’s all domestic production,” he said. “And obviously that’s a valuable market for that small industry. If you have a monopoly, you probably don’t want to give it up.”
Japan is dragging out the process, Quarles said, through an “unusual” handling of the pest risk assessment framework APHIS uses to determine if potential imported plant commodity pests should be regulated and the strength of any phytosanitary measures taken.
“Usually you would have a pest list, however many pests are on that. And you would have a pest risk assessment that embodied all of those pests,” Quarles said. “Japan has taken the unusual position of saying we will do individual pest risk assessments on every pest. I’ve done this for three decades. I’ve never seen that type of thing before. I think a lot of our government folks have never seen anything like that before.
“It appears to be a tactic that will allow you to delay things almost indefinitely. If you provide one pest risk assessment on one pest every year and you’ve identified 30 pests, it’s going to be three decades before you ever get to the end of that list. That seems to be the tactic, is just to drag things out and delay, delay, delay.”
Quarles wrote in a June 2023 column for Spudman that full access to the Japanese market would result in a 10% to 15% increase in global U.S. fresh potato exports, or $150 million to $200 million annually.
On Aug. 12, Quarles pointed to a 96% increase in fresh exports to Mexico, which fully opened to U.S. fresh potatoes in May 2023 and is expected to generate an additional $250 million per year for U.S. exports within five years, as proof of what is possible in Japan.
In April, following a visit to the Capitol by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. lawmakers wrote President Joe Biden, urging assistance in kickstarting the multimillion-dollar trade issue.
Current measures to break the impasse aren’t working, Quarles said.
“Japan has some things, in the agricultural space or outside of the agricultural space, that they may want from the United States,” he said. “If the U.S. really digs its heels in and says ‘We’re not budging on anything for you, Japan, until you start honoring your commitments,’ I think that is a step that is likely to break things loose.
“Folks would have you believe it’s really complicated. At the end of the day, it’s not. They want a benefit, and the U.S. wants a benefit. Time to make a deal.”
Farm bill update
Quarles doesn’t hold out much more hope for the prospect of getting a farm bill passed by the Oct. 1 fiscal year deadline, though “everybody is hoping,” he said. “They’re pressing Congress really hard to do as much work as they possibly can.”
The House ag committee has passed a bipartisan bill that has not yet been voted on by the full House, while the Senate ag committee has not passed a version.
The farm bill expires every five years. The current bill, which expires Sept. 30, extended policies enacted by the 2018 Farm Bill.
Action could still be taken after the upcoming presidential election, Quarles said, if both bodies make progress.
“If a window opens after the election in a lame duck session, if the House has a bill that is agreed upon and the Senate has a bill agreed upon, you could see a window open where they could get it done,” he said. “But right now, the House is having challenges getting their version of the farm bill across the House floor. The Senate ag committee hasn’t even reported out a bill yet.
“We’re running out of calendar days, and they’ve got to get going.”
— By Melinda Waldrop, managing editor
