Oklahoma farmers await USMCA as Senate takes up trade deal

OKLAHOMA CITY (KOKH) — As Iran and impeachment dominate talk in Washington, farmers across the US have their gaze fixed to a trade deal well over a year in the making.

We have to go all the way back to late November 2018. That's when the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico agreed on an update to the longstanding NAFTA trade deal.

Fast-forward to December 2019, and the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed what would be known as the USMCA, sending it over to the Senate where it sits now.

All that time, farmers across the country struggled.

"All across the county farmers are stretched to their absolute end," said Rodd Moesel, President of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau. "Depending on your commodity, you've had four or five years of very low prices."

Data from the American Farm Bureau shows Oklahoma was in the middle of the pack in terms of farm bankruptcies in 2019. However, Oklahoma had the largest increase in the year, jumping from 2 in 2018 to 16 in 2019.

But farmers, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, are hopeful the USMCA can jumpstart the industry. Senator James Lankford spoke about the deal on the Senate floor Thursday.

“In Oklahoma, Canada and Mexico were also our biggest trading partners and they're vital to our success and our economic success and have been key to what has happened in NAFTA over the last 25 years," said Lankford. "But now after all the negotiations and all of the noise, we finally have some revised area in trade that needs to be addressed."

Moesel tells us the big winners in the deal will be poultry and dairy farmers who deal with Canada. In Oklahoma, wheat farmers are the big winners.

"Canada had graded our wheat very harshly, so it paid our wheat farmers a feed grade price, so for feeding to animals instead of a human food grade," said Moesel. "So it's going to be a big help to our grain farmers."

Most importantly, Moesel hopes getting this deal done will be a launching point for other global trade deals.

"Getting this deal done hopefully sets the stage to getting full deals done with China and Japan and many of our other trading partners around the world," said Moesel.