With the announcement of the Reciprocal Trade Agreement with Ecuador being finalized, the U.S. Meat Export Federation is highlighting the benefits in the agreement for beef and pork. Erin Borror, U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) Vice President for Economic Analysis explains, “The tariff on beef is basically 20 percent and that’s phased to zero in the agreement over three years. And for pork, tariffs of 45 percent are mostly phased out. There are some exceptions, so the further processed products and sausages, we’ll see tariffs remain at 30 percent. But for most of the frozen and nearly all of the chilled potential business, those tariffs are phased out from 40 percent.”
“Getting countries to recognize FSIS as the U.S. Food Safety Authority as the competent authority, and therefore recognizing all FSIS-inspected facilities as eligible to export, rather than going through onerous questionnaires, plant-by-plant audits, maintaining plant lists, which have gotten to be unmanageable,” said Borror.
Borror also explained the similarities between Guatemala and Ecuador, saying “If we take Guatemala, U.S. beef export growth from 2006 to 2025, we saw growth from $3 million to $105 million. And for pork, the market went from $10 million to $148 million. Ecuador today is minimal. We did $3 million in beef last year, and again, pork is practically nothing. So there’s great potential.”
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.