The United States announced Tuesday that it has established a dispute settlement panel under the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico to try to reach an agreement with Ottawa on its milk quotas.
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Washington had announced in early December the launch of a procedure considering that the Canadian government had adopted measures contrary to the provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and harming the interests of American dairy producers. In principle, in the absence of consensus, Washington could impose tariffs in the long term, but an American official underlined Tuesday during a conference call that one was
"far"
from this possibility.
The Biden administration believes the Canadian measures
"undermine the ability of US dairy exporters to sell their product line to Canadian consumers,"
the US Trade Representative (USTR) said in a statement.
The United States in particular criticizes Canadians for reserving part of their farmers' milk for Canadian dairies, who process it, thereby automatically reducing the quantity of milk sold to them by the United States.
No agreement found
"A top priority for the Biden-Harris administration is to fully enforce USMCA and ensure that it benefits American workers
,
"
said Ambassador Katherine Tai, quoted in the statement.
"The launch of the first panel request in the framework of the agreement will allow our dairy industry and its workers to seize new opportunities in the context of AEUMC to market and sell American products to Canadian consumers"
, she estimated. In December,
"we had discussions with Canada but unfortunately we did not come to an agreement through this process,"
said another US official.
This is the first ever panel request under USMCA Chapter 31 (Dispute Settlement), the USTR also said. The procedure will last at least a few months since the setting up of this panel will already take about a month before a preliminary report expected at most 120 days later and a final report within the following 30 days.