Agricultural export officials are deeply disappointed to see the U.S. withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, in part because they are concerned that terms as favorable to the U.S. as those contained in the agreement cannot be duplicated in bilateral agreements.

Ben Conner, policy director for U.S. Wheat Associates, said tariffs under the TPP would have gone to zero for exports to many of the 12 countries that are signatories to the agreement; at the same time, the agreement provided other trade advantages in the phytosanitary and biotechnology areas.

At the same time the U.S. is pulling back on negotiations, competitors around the world are moving full speed ahead to negotiate deals that he fears will leave the U.S. on the outside as potential customers lock up deals with other countries.

History of agreements
It has been obvious since the time of Marco Polo that trade can be a good thing — supplying one part of the world with exotic or essential products that come from another part of the world.

But it was not until the 1980s that rapidly expanding technology made it easy to identify which nations might benefit from free-trade agreements that reduced tariffs and other barriers and allowed a freer flow of goods that might be mutually beneficial to specific countries.

It didn't take long for it to become obvious that U.S. agriculture, with its abundance of productive cropland and entrepreneurial farmers, would be a major beneficiary of free-trade agreements that would allow the sale of agricultural products into hungry markets.

In 1985, the U.S. signed its very first free-trade agreement — with Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Since then, the U.S. has entered into agreements with 19 other countries: Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Oman, Panama, Peru and Singapore.

Among the most important of those agreements is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which superseded prior individual agreements with Mexico and Canada in 1994. More recently, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which was signed on Feb. 4, 2016, but was never ratified, would have included Mexico and Canada and would have modernized many of the provisions of NAFTA, including a reduction or removal of tariffs on a number of products such as sugar, dairy, feed grains and wheat.

Ag has much to gain — or to lose
Floyd Gaibler, director of trade policy and biotech for the U.S. Grains Council, said that industries like agriculture that are able to supply far more product than their domestic market can consume would benefit from the ability to attract new customers around the world.

"Of all the protected areas of any economy, agriculture rates close to the top," Gaibler said. "Almost every country has strong protections for its domestic agriculture industry if for no other reason than to protect self-sufficiency."

He said the obvious first trading partners are traditional allies and next-door neighbors, which led to the earliest U.S. agreements. But once tariffs were overcome, agreements began to stretch out to include other non-tariff barriers such as protection of intellectual property, protection of the environment, enforcement of fair labor rules and phytosanitary issues.

"It's just up in the air whether those advantages could be repeated in bilateral agreements with Canada and Mexico, but it's doubtful," Gaible said. Also lost, he said, is the provision that would have allowed a fast-track mediation of disputes over non-tariff barrier issues such as grain shipments that "contain too much soil."

Overall, backing out of the TPP will cost U.S. agriculture about $4.5 billion a year in exports, along with the loss of potential markets for corn in Vietnam, which now has prohibitive tariffs; the loss of beef sales to Japan; and reduced markets for meat and livestock, rice and wheat, and other products to the remaining partners.

See related stories: Bunkers of grain on the ground spotlight need for new markets, With TPP off the table, how does U.S. kick-start new talks? and Without trade agreements, farmers lose markets and money.