The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced this week that an extra $300m is being made available to the regional agricultural promotion program (RAPP) to help grow export markets for American farm and food products around the world.

This is part of a $1.2bn scheme that was announced in October last year by US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack to assist exporters expand their markets for US agri-food products beyond their established markets.

The first $300m tranche, which was released in May this year, attracted proposals valued at over $1m and 66 US organisations were successful with their applications.

The second round of funding is open for applications up to 4 October and it is anticipated that the USDA will announce allocations before the end of the year.

Warm welcome

Unsurprisingly, the announcement has been warmly welcomed by the US Meat Export Federation (USMEF), which, as the name suggests, is the trade association that represent meat exporters.

Its president and CEO described the first tranche of the funding as “already at work identifying and developing new opportunities globally for US pork, beef and lamb, and USMEF is excited to see that implementation of the program continues to move forward”.

He highlighted that it “allows for dedication of resources in markets where demand has only scratched the surface” and compliments other USDA market support programmes as well as “checkoff investments”.

The checkoff is broadly comparable with the Bord Bia levy collected at the point of slaughter in Ireland.

EU market access

The EU is a market that the US would see as not delivering its potential for US agri-food exports. The main issue is that the EU bans imports of agri-food products that have been produced with the assistance of growth promoting hormones, as is the case with US beef.

This was the subject of a longstanding dispute over 20 years ago in which the World Trade Organisation (WTO) disputes resolution organisation ruled in favour of the US.

This is because the EU ban on hormones is based on what they call the precautionary principle and this defence was successfully rebutted by the US on the basis that there was no scientific evidence of any consumer risk from eating meat from animals that were fed hormones.

Ultimately, a solution was found by the EU granting the US a 35,000-tonne tariff-free quota.

It isn’t just hormones that the US is unhappy with the EU about. At the end of this year, the European Union deforestation regulation (EUDR) is scheduled to come into effect.

This is whereby countries exporting to the EU must demonstrate that the produce being exported isn’t produced from land that has been deforested.

The regulation was originally adopted in 2021 and was at least partly in response to the pushback to the Mercosur trade agreement of 2019.

The US says that deforestation simply isn’t an issue in their production system, but that the EU has a one-size-fits-all approach with the regulation. This is seen by the US as heavy handed and a further barrier for exporting US beef to the EU.

The EU and US have long had something of a fraught relationship when it comes to trade, with the Boeing-Airbus dispute which ran for years an example.

EU farmers rightly insist that any imports to the EU must be bound by the same production rules that they are subject to, even if there is some sympathy with the position on hormones which were also legal in the EU before 1988.

As for marketing and directing financial support to farmers and the agri-food sector, the US government in recent years has set the standard and what is also notable is that while generous funding is also available for climate change measures, the focus is very much on productive agriculture.