It was smiles pretty much all around as House Democrats and the Trump administration announced agreement to move forward with the president’s replacement for NAFTA. Minnesota Farm Bureau President Kevin Paap says the USMCA modernizes and improves that earlier agreement and will “strengthen our science-based rules; take care of some wheat grading issues; dairy access that we’ve had some concerns about.”

Minnesota Chamber of Commerce President Doug Loon says the USMCA agreement brings reassurance and certainty “to those businesses that have long had important supply-chain, retail relationships with our two most important trading partners, that being Canada and Mexico.” Loon calls the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement an excellent example of bipartisan work — something we don’t see enough of.

Paap says with the USMCA agreement, farmers “really didn’t give up a lot. We didn’t get to zero with all tariffs with Canada, but we’re going in the right direction.”

(Learfield News Service)