Look At Beef To Understand Why U.S. Trade Needs A Makeover    

The international trade landscape is quickly shifting as President Donald Trump makes one bold tariff move after another in his effort to forge more favorable trade agreements for the United States.   

Look no further than the global beef trade to understand why Trump wants to steer U.S. trade in a new direction. The imbalance within this industry illustrates the broader trade issues that leave the U.S. at a disadvantage.

Most beef produced in the U.S. is sold in the U.S., but 10-15 percent is exported ($10.45 billion worth exported in 2024).

At the same time, the U.S. is one of the world’s largest beef importers ($11.73 billion imported in 2024 according to the U.S. Census Bureau), mostly from Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and New Zealand.

Why do we both import and export beef?

“Imported beef is lean beef trimmings that are combined with fat trimmings from U.S. fed cattle to meet demand for ground beef,” according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA).

The U.S. has a different trade agreement with each country. Multiply the number of agreements by the number of trade rules governing each product — vehicles, crude oil, textiles, toys — and you can see the complexity of the trade system.   

When we talk trade, it sounds like one country is buying from another. But it is mostly businesses, in this case, the 622,000 large and small U.S. cattle ranchers and farmers.

Let’s look at how three countries relate to U.S. beef: Australia, Brazil, and China, each illustrating an aspect of the trade imbalances Trump is trying to resolve across many sectors.    

Australia

The U.S. has had a free trade agreement with Australia for 20 years. In that time, Australia has sold $28.7 billion of beef to U.S. consumers, but fresh U.S. beef has been banned for sale there.

U.S. beef producers can only sell Australia cooked beef. Over 20 years, Australia has imported $31 million of precooked U.S. beef, creating a deficit. It could get bigger; Australia wants to expand sales in the U.S.    

Australian Wagyu beef now has an estimated 48 percent of the U.S. market, leaving a minority, 41 percent market share for U.S.-produced Wagyu beef.  

“Australia has used a myriad of sanitary concerns and endless bureaucratic red tape to delay the approval of U.S. beef even though the United States is internationally recognized as having some of the highest food safety and animal health standards in the world,” the NCBA wrote in a statement to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. “For the past few years, we have been told by the Australian government that we are in the final stages of approval, yet we continue to see delays … If the Australians will not accept our beef products, then it is only fair that we reciprocate.”

This regulatory red tape is an example of a non-tariff restriction. These restrictions are part of the negotiations for more favorable trade.

Brazil

In the past five years, Brazil has sold $4.45 billion of beef in the U.S., but Brazil has placed many non-tariff restrictions on U.S. beef. In the same time frame, the U.S. has sold $21 million of beef to Brazil. Like Australia, we are comparing billions in imports to millions in exports.

The staggering $4.3 billion beef trade deficit with Brazil is concerning, but NCBA says it is more worried about something else: importing meat contaminated with foot-and-mouth disease as well as mad cow disease, known scientifically as atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

In November 2021, then-Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack received a letter from the NCBA warning that Brazil took “several weeks” to report two cases to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), while most countries report BSE within hours or days.    

“Brazil has a history of delayed reporting of BSE cases including one atypical case in 2019 (2 months), an atypical case in 2014 (1 month), and an atypical case in 2012 (nearly 2 years),” the letter said. “Brazil enjoys the benefits of market access awarded to countries with the credibility of OIE’s negligible risk designation – credibility that is based on the timely reporting of BSE cases to the OIE.”

NCBA called for the suspension of importing Brazil’s fresh meat in the U.S. market, and wrote a similar letter to Vilsack in February 2023 after another case of atypical BSE was discovered and reported 35 days later. The Biden Administration allowed Brazilian beef to continue flowing into the U.S.  

Now the NCBA hopes Trump will suspend Brazilian beef imports until the USDA audits Brazil’s safety standards for animal health and food safety.

China

In 2003, China and other countries banned the import of U.S. beef after the U.S. found a case of BSE. The USDA worked to restore the market and in 2016 the Chinese market started to reopen under President Barack Obama, but with heavy non-tariff trade restrictions.

The first shipment of beef was in 2017, under Trump, after the U.S.-China 100-Day Action Plan removed many restrictions, and China recognized the authority of the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service (FISA).  China became a $2 billion a year market for U.S. beef.

In the 2020 Phase One Agreement, China promised to “conduct a risk assessment” for ractopamine, a growth additive in cattle and swine feed allowed in the U.S. but banned or restricted in some countries. It has accepted swine with ractopamine but the agreement is not specific about beef.

China started to reject beef shipments if it detected any ractopamine, and banned further shipments from beef processing plants and cold storage facilities that sent such beef.

That $2 billion market is now effectively closed, Kent Bacus, executive director of government affairs at NCBA, told The Federalist.

The tariff on U.S. beef was 12 percent, moved up to 22 percent in March, and this week, a few more increases brought the beef tariff exporting to China to over 100 percent.

“China has not lived up to some of the terms of that agreement, but now it has definitely progressed to where we have any access,” Bacus said. “China buys a lot of beef cuts that are not popular with Americans. We really don’t have a lot of other markets for them. Their unique culinary demands provide us a good opportunity for cuts that Americans just don’t find appetizing or just aren’t willing to pay much for, so that has been a good market for us to sell those cuts.”

The Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia markets would take these beef cuts (internal organs, etc.) but we have high tariffs in some of these places and there are competitors that already have duty free access to those markets.

Trade Bait

“The United States is a prized market for beef sales,” according to the NCBA comments. “Developing countries like Paraguay and Colombia see market access to the U.S. as an endorsement of their product and that is why beef access has been a top policy goal for these governments. Brazil and Paraguay were granted access under highly questionable conditions, and we do not want the U.S. government to continue using beef access as trade bait with South American countries, including Colombia.”

Biden granted Paraguay permission in 2023 to sell fresh beef in the U.S., and Colombia is waiting for access to the U.S. beef market. Both countries have had foot-and-mouth disease, which has been eradicated from the U.S since 1929.

Every country has a story. The U.S. has a beef trade deficit with Argentina, another country with a history of foot-and-mouth disease; Taiwan has non-tariff restrictions; Vietnam has a 30 percent tariff on U.S. beef, but Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have duty-free access to the Vietnam market; and the European Union restricts U.S. beef sales in part because of the EU Deforestation Regulation which claims cattle are linked to deforestation.  

“We produce 18 percent of the world’s beef with 6 percent of the world’s cattle,” Bacus said. “We can raise cattle in all 50 states. We raise cattle 365 days a year. And not only do we feed all of America, but we feed the world. Beef is an important protein. It’s an important part of food security, and we don’t want to discourage that. We want to encourage it, and we want to continue to make the cattle and beef sector as competitive and as profitable as possible. Trade agreements help us achieve those goals.”

Every business sector that trades internationally is similarly complex. Hopefully Wall Street has the patience to ride out the surprises that are sure to come as the U.S. negotiates America first trade agreements.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.