Bob Cummings, U.S. Trade Representative's Office

Speaker:

Bob Cummings
U.S. Trade Representative's Office

MR. ALLBEE: Thank you. I would like to next introduce Mr. Bob Cummings. Bob is the senior economist at U.S. Trade Representative's Office of Agricultural Affairs where he has responsibilities for a broad range of trade policy issues. He has worked on the agricultural trade policy issues at USDA's Foreign Agriculture Service and Economic Resource Service. He has also served on the staff of the Senate Agricultural Committee.

Thank you.

MR. CUMMINGS: Thank you very much. And I also would like to thank the Department of Agriculture of Vermont. I thank you very much.

We are here to listen this morning, so I will not spend all my time doing that. But just a brief comment that really goes to the basic principles of agricultural trade policy, which are really the principles of opportunity and fairness and respect for science.

As a Commissioner, agriculture is very much dependent on the exports and what we are looking for is the opportunity to sell to the 96 percent of the world population that lives outside of the United States, and that's really our focus at USTR. Producers also depend, besides access, on certain impartial enforcement of trade laws and subsidies and also to protect against import services. And exporters and consumers alike, inspection regime to ensure competence in the body and to make sure they are not created in the trade barriers.

We brought agriculture into the world trading system in 1995. We have made significant progress in the areas of market access. We have made some progress on export subsidies and also on the trade domestic export regimes. But we have much, much more work to do. And that really underlies the goals for the new negotiations which we started in Seattle this year.

I want to emphasize here that agriculture is really at the heart of these negotiations and we are committed and the other members are committed in the early round to further work on agriculture. And that's what we are going to do in the next round. We are preparing to look for in Geneva some proposals that we would like to see happen in the next negotiations and these will focus on improvements in market access and elimination of export subsidies, respect on a scientific basis for assessing new technologies in agriculture, and also some disciplines, putting some disciplines on state trading enterprises and how they affect agricultural imports and exports. And so sessions like this that we have attended are very important for us to get as we move increasingly to becoming more specific about what we want to achieve in the next rounds.

So, I appreciate the opportunity for being here and I look forward to hearing from you today.

Thank you very much.