Team MAGA again getting ahead of themselves as they attempt to reassure voter base formed by farmers...
A day after President Trump hailed "a breakthrough agreement" on trade with Europe, European officials said the president and his aides are exaggerating the scope of their new pact.
While Mr. Trump told an Iowa crowd Thursday that "we just opened up Europe for you farmers," officials in Brussels later said he did no such thing.
"On agriculture, I think we've been very clear on that—that agriculture is out of the scope of these discussions," Mina Andreeva, the European Commission spokeswoman, told reporters in Brussels on Friday. "We are not negotiating about agricultural products," added Ms. Andreeva, who was part of the European delegation visiting Washington earlier this week.
Officials on both sides agree that two specific agricultural matters came up. The Europeans said they were already engaged—prior to Wednesday's handshake at the White House—with U.S. counterparts to boost high-quality beef imports from America as part of an effort to resolve a longstanding trade dispute. And they said they would seek to buy more U.S. soybeans, a politically sensitive sector for Mr. Trump, because China has cut imports of the crop in a separate trade tiff.
But European officials say that beyond those two specific areas, they made quite clear during the White House meeting that they would not include any broader discussion of agriculture in the pending talks.
Agriculture is one of the most sensitive and difficult trade questions for Europe, especially for France, and the U.S. and Europe have fought for years over everything from European tariffs to U.S. use of hormones and genetically modified products. They say that when Trump aides tried to broaden the talks from industrial products to agriculture, they threatened to demand the U.S. drop its "Buy American" provisions for government procurement, a non-starter for the Trump administration.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-...ope-for-farmers-europeans-disagree-1532714117The U.S. side "heavily insisted to insert the whole field of agricultural products," Mr. Juncker told reporters right after the meeting. "We refused that because I don't have a mandate and that's a very sensitive issue in Europe."
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Mr. Trump and his aides interpret that differently than their European counterparts. "Our view is that we are negotiating about agriculture, period," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee Thursday.