Wheat growers want Trump to maintain Korea trade deal

RITZVILLE — Two organizations representing wheat and barley growers in Eastern Washington are asking President Trump not to withdraw from the U.S. free trade agreement with South Korea.

“They’ve long been our third-biggest customer (for white wheat), buying about 800,000 metric tons in 2017,” said Glen Squires, chief executive with the Washington Grain Commission in Spokane.

“It’s a big market, we don’t want to disrupt that, and that’s why we’re concerned,” Squires said.

Squires added that South Korea bought 1.42 million metric tons of U.S. wheat in 2017 — with 760,000 metric tons of that soft white wheat from the Pacific Northwest. The remaining 655,000 metric tons is hard red wheat, which is grown mostly in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest.

While most grain importers buy from a diverse supplier base, Squires said he expects South Korean grain buyers would likely increase the amount of wheat bought from Australian, Canadian, and even Russian farmers.

“When tariffs are imposed, that makes us less competitive,” Squires said.

“Washington wheat farmers encourage the administration to continue the dialogue between the U.S. and (South) Korean governments,” said Ben Adams, a Coulee City farmer and president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. “Our industry reminds lawmakers that agriculture contributed positively to the trade balance and canceling this agreement with our important trade ally is harmful to our exports.”

In the 2012 USDA census of agriculture, the most recently available data, about 150,000 acres of wheat were cultivated in Grant County and nearly 277,000 acres in Adams County.

The U.S. finalized a free trade deal with South Korea, a longstanding ally and the United States’ sixth-largest trading partner, in 2012, according to information published by the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office (USTR).

While U.S.-South Korea trade was worth about $122 billion in 2015, Americans bought about $27.7 billion more in goods from South Korea than they sold. South Koreans, however, purchased nearly $11 billion more in services from the United States than they sold, according to the USTR.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.