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China announces in will lift ban on U.S. beef

Not sure what this really means as China has a ban on racotopamine. I have not seen or heard any details on the aforementioned agreement. My guess is that their racto ban will not be lifted and very little U.S. beef is destined for China. The market reaction yesterday reveals what traders think this means.
 
Interesting, but wonder what China 'wants' in return?

WB, can you refresh us about ractopamine? I've forgotten what it is or why it is used. Does China use it as a trade barrier, or what? They don't seem to be 'lily white' on what the put into food, so surprises me anything would be an issue if they want our beef.

mrj
 
I wish more beef producers were more familiar with ractopamine. It is fed to cattle the last 30-40 of the finishing diet. The current product is called Optaflexx. In hogs it is called Paylean.

China bought a whole hog production system in the US from farrow to rail, lock stock and barrel so they could isolate their product for importation into their country. So I don't think the Chinese are using it as a trade barrier.

I have talked with several professionals in the meat industry who say that Optaflexx fed cattle have poor eating qualities such as bland rubbery tasting beef. It is one of the reasons I believe beef domestic demand is suffering.
 
Gee, isn't it funny that the cattle market tanks while TPP is being fought over. Of course the appeal for added export markets at such a time is great. Except that it doesn't take into account how similar "free trade" agreements helped get us here in the first place. The US has for years been a net beef IMPORTER.
 
Since threads on here don't seem real forum specific, and why, exactly, can't trade deals be made without TPP? Apparently this one will be. Maybe the idea of President Trump makes them nervous, and they figure they need to get ahead of it to save face and maintain some appearance that they are in control.


http://ranchers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=76267

http://m.beefmagazine.com/blog/tpp-more-about-control-trade

And this is Beef Magazine.....

Is TPP more about control than trade?
by Alan Newport
Alan Newport
Aug 30, 2016
The Trans Pacific Partnership has been debated for quite some time, with arguments on both sides of the issue. Is it good for beef trade?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been pushed for months now by many agricultural groups as a great boon to all ag industries. But after months of study I have concluded it is far more damaging than beneficial.

First, it's my estimation the actual gains appear small and slow to come. An example is in this USDA publication which specifically mentions trade with Japan. It says Japan will eliminate duties on 74% of its beef and beef product imports within 16 years, with substantial cuts to the remaining tariffs.

Note the length of the timetable, however. Most of the Japanese tariffs are to be reduced significantly or eliminated within 13-16 years. If we think of this as an investment such as we would make on the farm or ranch, is that a good one? How many business investments do you make that don't pay off for 16 years? Even most cows supposedly pay off by the sixth year.

More importantly, Japan has the right under TPP to maintain restrictive import quotas on at least 33 classifications of agricultural goods, so this is no true clearing of the deck.

I wonder what the Japanese agreements might net for U.S. beef producers, considering Japan was recently listed as the largest importer of US beef products at $1.6 billion.

In August just gone by, USDA said farmers (everyone below the packer) were getting 42% of the retail beef value and that percentage is dropping steadily. In addition, the wholesale-to-retail spread has been increasing steadily from about $1.20 per pound in 2000 to $2.50 per pound in 2015, and the farm-to-wholesale spread has been and continues a flat trend, varying from 25-50 cents.

So if we assume for a moment that TPP supporters and the USDA are using retail values for beef, then that 42% of retail price would be $672 million total value for farmers. If we increased our take by an average of perhaps 15%, assuming that might be a reasonable improvement in our pricing after tariffs were gone or fully reduced, then we might see an additional $100 million here at home, distributed in typical crocodile-feeding-frenzy fashion among the three sectors of the beef industry. With USDA's count of 915,000 beef farms, that's about a dollar per operation, or with 30 million cows, that's about $3.30 per cow.


But I expect that is wishful thinking, as the top dogs usually eat more and let only the smallest scraps filter down the food chain; remember the shrinking farm-to-retail and farm-to-wholesale spreads.

Worse however, are these facts: TPP robs the ability of nations, including the United States, to make their own deals, and it puts their fates in the hands of international tribunals, and that it gives immense power to corporations to control the trade decisions of nations through lawsuits and other means.

First and foremost, TPP is an attack on our sovereignty. This means U.S. citizens are the only people in the world who were truly put in charge of our own affairs. Sadly, we have squandered our rights and frittered away our power, handing it over to the elected and bureaucratic megalomaniacs who we foolishly call "leaders," and to the big money that buys them. All these people are in cahoots to give themselves the ultimate power and control. It's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in real life.

An excellent article in The American Thinker last fall noted the 5,544-page TPP document contains seven things which have little to do with trade and everything to do with world government and cronyism:

A legislative body superior to Congress
A vehicle to pass Obama's climate-change treaty
Increased legal immigration
Reduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticals
Quotas on U.S. agricultural exports
Increased currency manipulation
Reduced U.S. power and self rule
An example is in Chapter 10, which calls for the opening of U.S. borders to foreign service companies that want to bring foreign workers with them to provide services in the U.S. Chapter 12 calls for the opening of U.S. borders to any foreign professionals they bring in. Chapter 12, "Temporary entry for business persons," provides that visas must be supplied to the professionals being brought into the country by these service companies and that they must be allowed to bring their spouse and children with them.

But under the appendices to Chapter 12, almost all of the other countries participating in the TPP limit immigration to certain professions and limit the length of stay of these "temporary" workers. For example, Japan limits entry to businessmen, specific professions and to technicians who have the equivalent of a Japanese associate's degree. It also limits the amount of time that they can stay in the country to five years. No such appendix appears for the United States.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said just days ago only five of 30 chapters deal with trade, and an examination of the table of contents and chapter summaries shows this is a fair assessment. The rest of TPP regulates an unimaginable number things, including the internet.

Paul Craig Roberts, an economist, journalist and former assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy for President Reagan says one of the primary functions of TPP is to set global corporations above the laws of the nations where they operate.

William F. Jasper in The New American said much the same: "The real agenda behind the TPP is to consolidate and centralize economic and political power. The main organizing entity behind the TPP agenda is the secretive Trilateral Commission ... intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States."

If you want to read more about TPP, remember everyone you read is biased and you'll have to filter through all that and try to discern the truth. Notice, too, that I put a link to the actual TPP document at the beginning of this blog, should you want to read through more than 5,500 pages.

Come to think of it, that should be reason enough reject the agreement.

The article in The American Thinker I quoted earlier says, "The only truly redeeming option of the TPP is that we can easily get out of it ... any country can withdraw from the agreement, simply by giving six months notice."

But I have a better idea. Let's demand Congress throw the damned thing in the incinerator where it belongs. Then we can work on real trade deals instead of setting up international governments.

More TPP links you might want to read:

http://www.tppcoalition.org/about/

(This list is corporate entities given early access to TPP)

http://www.flushthetpp.org/tpp-corporate-insiders/

http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Trade/Tran ... eement-TPP

Political donations to US congressional members:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -track-tpp
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I havnt read it but heard China wants traceability. That's a hoot coming from the land of melamine. I don't know who it is that wants traceability but I bet it's not China.
 
Brad S said:
That's incisive analysis traveler. Fundamentally, most of us are free traders, but we can trade without giving up sovereignty.
Click to expand...

Free trade is a fine idea in principle. But it turns out free trade does not necessarily mean fair trade.
 
Hasn't isolationism been shown to be a disadvantage to us in the USA, given we have a miniscule population compared with the rest of the world?

Don't we need to imports some lean beef so long as we produce so much fat in order to get the superior high quality tender beef our customers from ACROSS THE WORLD want from us? And, don't forget that we produce far more beef with fewer cows in this nation than in the past.

Add the fact that communication is virtually instantaneous to any place in the world, movement of most trade goods gets faster than ever (except maybe the US Postal System in rural areas!) and most of us LIKE quite a few products we get from other nations.

Now, if we could find simpler ways to level the playing fields than trade agreements, more fair to all concerned, and then level the tax rates we pay in the USA.......maybe we would create marketing Utopia. Personally, I'm not holding my breath till it happens.

mrj




)
 
Hasn't isolationism been shown to be a disadvantage to us in the USA, given we have a miniscule population compared with the rest of the world?
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Not when it comes to labor. Here we are talking about making the minimum wage $15 per hour and some countries still basically have slave wages. How do we compete in the world market while paying up to 100 times the labor costs for manufacturing an item?

Don't we need to imports some lean beef so long as we produce so much fat in order to get the superior high quality tender beef our customers from ACROSS THE WORLD want from us? And, don't forget that we produce far more beef with fewer cows in this nation than in the past.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely absurd. It takes as much as 6 times the energy fed to produce fat as it does lean muscle in cattle. Too much fat produced here and buying beef from other countries to offset it falls flat on it's face. Too much fat is a poorly designed genetic pool and a lack of monitoring in the feeding process, along with an inferior beef grading system. There are feedlots out there that can predict at delivery the cost of gain going forward until finish, length of time to finish, and market the cattle on an individual daily basis, instead of selling a whole pen full at one time where we know all won't finish equally and/or at the same time.

One way to eliminate a lot of fat is for producers to utilize the good feedyards, retain ownership on the grid and know what type product they are producing. Until they get paid significantly less for an overabundance of fat, breeding decisions will not change.

http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/latest/Dan-Dorn-Decatur-County-Feedyard-on-cattle-feeding-profitability.html
 
Mike, you're absolutely correct when you note how expensive fat is to produce, but still it's a reality that the U.S. produces an excess of fat. That excess of fat attracts foreign lean in which to mix it - that's the market relationship on which mrj was focusing. For less than $10/head, breathours ultrasound program will do an amazing job of cleaning up this needless expense. You know the song, "every hand's a winner, every hand's a loser" - with better information we can know which calf to feed for which grid target and come close to making every calf a winner. While the trimmings mixing noted by mrj is everyday a reality, ultimately it's an expense born by less successful feeders. Nickel corn can cover up a lot of warts in the feedlot (not $2.50/calves as we've recently learned the hard way). $.08 corn should usher in a sea change that vastly reduces the amount of fat in the beef supply.
 
Mike, it well may be "absurd" for some producers to add so much fat to our US beef production, however, it is also a fact of life. Most likely, there are a variety of reasons. Many of us have and continue to improve upon that situation. And some never will because they are raising cattle for the love of it, or to utilize their grass and don't necessarily need to be efficient in their beef production. Doubtless many more 'reasons' exist for the practice.
Another interesting point: Progressive Cattleman, Oct 2016 issue carries a story about beef production, noting that annual production is forecast to reach 25 billion pounds in 2016, up 5.3% from last year, and total commercial beef production in 2017 is forecast at 3.4% higher at nearly 26 billion pounds. Not sure what that includes, but if it doesn't include imports, it appears that our trend of producing more beef per cow continues.

Interesting is that Beef imports into the USA through June were down 13% and total imports for 2016 are forecast to be down 12% on a yearly basis, and even further in 2017, if projections continue.

That, while some groups continue to insist that imports are growing. Strange.

mrj





















lso interesting to me is that beef imports are down about 16% from one year ago. Total imports through June were down 13%. And total 2016 imports are forecast to be down 12% on a yearly basis. Beef imports are expected to decline even more in 2017.
 
those projected increases are sobering when you think about the effect they'll have on prices. It stands reason that lower prices should repel some imports. Seen hard times before - never ready for them.
 
Whether or not beef 'demand' is anemic may not be as important as the ability of our citizens to pay what it costs to raise and process beef. Many people are scared of this economy and what our government is doing to the value of our dollar with their mis-management and micro-management of everything they touch.

Add all the other people, non-government organizations, doctors and religions, and more telling us that everything under and including the sun is dangerous to our health, immoral, or otherwise not good for us, the environment, or outer space, it is miraculous that people still want to eat beef, imho.

For consumption of beef to remain as high as it is, the Beef Check-Off must be doing something right! We need to make it stronger to reach more consumers more often and help them make better use of more beef cuts.

And just maybe there is less of that "junk" beef on grocer's shelves than some in our own cattle production business persist in telling the world! Too much good beef still is lost to bruising.....after years of work and considerable success in cutting the damage on many of our ranches. We need improvement in handling to eliminate bruising AFTER cattle leave the ranch, too. Congratulations to truckers and others in finding causes of bruising while cattle are hauled to the processing plant, and their promises to eliminate that problem, according to recent news stories. We all need to work harder to eliminate the seemingly small problems in production to make our cattle and beef production the best it can be.

mrj
 
For consumption of beef to remain as high as it is, the Beef Check-Off must be doing something right! We need to make it stronger to reach more consumers more often and help them make better use of more beef cuts.
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The main answer to why beef consumption has fallen dramatically in the past few years and poultry consumption has doubled itself and doubled Beef consumption probably lies somewhere in the Price/Demand equation.

Point is.................Beef Consumption is NOT HIGH (as you say). Poultry consumption is about equal Beef & Pork consumption combined.

Now what's this about the Check-Off doing something right? I really don't remember the last time I saw a "BEEF" advertisement, but then I haven't been reading as many farm/ranch oriented magazines. :lol: :lol:
 
Your checkoff dollar is of course also advertising the junk now being imported from Brazil, especially true now that consumers know less about the country of origin of the beef they are buying then their underwear. Thank you NCBA.
 
Mike, maybe you read what you wanted to see, not what I wrote! I'm thankful that beef is "as high as it is", not that I believe it is high enough for those of us who need to make a living raising it. Fact is, beef is one of very few foods eaten at about what our all-knowing government officials believe we should be consuming. I believe more would be healthful for us and also good for our business.

Your little slam about Check off advertising in ag magazines is cute! But not really honest. It is required by law that cattle producers be told what is being done with the money. That is the purpose of those ads. And all you would need to do is ask people serving on your state Beef Council, and you are even welcome at their meetings to give them your advice on how to best spend the money, if you raise cattle.

Angus 62, don't you realize that all beef importers pay the beef check off at the same rate as US cattle producers do? And do you really believe it helped sell more of 'our' beef to have that 'raised in the USA' label on even the very poorest quality beef raised here??? I believe the better system is the one we have now, where those who choose to showcase their best beef in one of the more than 150 or so branded beef labels have more than just a country of origin, with some including information about the product and even identify the producer! I believe that is a great idea, one that was prevented in the flawed law which did not allow for identification of the producer. I realize some of you love to hate NCBA, but really, there are other cattle producer organizations running the Beef Check off, along with the thousands of members of NCBA. You really should learn the facts, maybe even get on one of the beef councils or the Cattlemens' Beef Board and contribute to the efforts if you believe it needs better management. No one is stopping you. Volunteer members are needed for those boards every year. There are term limits, so you need not worry about it being too many years of commitment. There is even some expenses paid, so it isn't a terrific financial burden, though it isn't a total free ride, but many people over the years have given cheerfully to help this industry we believed in so strongly.

mrj
 

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