Republicans Ask USTR to Prioritize Fertilizer Trade With Canada, China
Four Republican senators, led by Roger Marshall of Kansas, asked U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai "to develop and begin executing a strategic plan for the long-term stability of fertilizer trade," because China, Russia and Belarus are unreliable trading partners for phosphates and potash. In a May 31 letter, the senators said the antidumping duties on Moroccan phosphates and the pending tariffs on urea ammonium nitrate from Trinidad and Tobago are only making the crunch worse. "Currently, 36% of the global tradable supply of phosphate fertilizers is not subject to U.S. duties," they wrote. "To believe these problems are only short-term is short-sighted. Even if the war in Ukraine would end tomorrow, our relations with Russia will take decades to heal and may never be the same. Western countries with fertilizer supply problems will be competing for fertilizer from 'friendly' countries."
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They suggested that the cross-border vaccine mandate between the U.S. and Canada is hindering the importation of fertilizer from that country, and they asked USTR to "engage with China to reduce or eliminate their fertilizer export restrictions, which decrease the supply of phosphates on the global market, driving prices up."