Dairy farmer Allen Huttema recently spoke about why the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) needs to be enforced. He explained that it’s vital each country, especially Canada, holds to even the spirit of the agreement. “Making sure that our dairy products, the amount that we intended to get into there, that that happens. And making sure that they do not continue to grow their exports,” Huttema said.
According to Huttema, they aren’t as worried about Mexico, even though they do want to get things going with the country to make sure they hold to side letters on common cheese names.
He also doesn’t want Canadian farmers to think that this is a direct attack on those in the dairy industry. “It is about upholding an agreement. They both stopped imports of our dairy products, which hurt our pay price because it kept more product in our country. They also started taking international markets away from us,” he explained.
Huttema said that farmers in the Pacific Northwest are hoping to get dairy into Canada because the closing of the borders prevented Canadians from getting into the United States to buy products and support the dairy industry.
