Turkey trade triumph? Roy Cooper says new deal with India will boost NC farmers
Gov. Roy Cooper met with United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Tuesday in Raleigh at a turkey farm operated by N.C. State University. They were promoting a new international trade deal for turkeys.
President Joe Biden's trade team, led by Tai, just finished a deal making it easier for American farmers to sell turkeys to India — home to more than 1.4 billion people. The deal will slash India's tariff on turkey imports from 30% down to 5%, which will make it more economical for foreign governments like the U.S. to import turkey meat into India.
Cooper said that’s good news for local farmers since North Carolina raises more turkeys than all but two other states.
"The Biden administration has been working very hard with our global partners, recognizing that North Carolina has so much in the way of agricultural products," Cooper said. "If we can open more doors across the world, that will help our farmers here and help the North Carolina economy."
Cooper and Biden are both Democrats.
Tai said it's still too early to tell what this new international deal might mean for turkey prices at grocery stores in the U.S. But she hopes what's good for farmers is also good for consumers, particularly in a state like North Carolina with so much poultry farming.
Cooper added that he's hoping more such deals are struck in the future. But there’s concern in Washington that a looming government shutdown might put other, similar deals on hold. The federal budget year starts in October, so a shutdown will begin Sunday unless a deal is reached before then.
"There's a big question about how much of my team I'm going to be able to keep employed doing that next week, if we have a government shutdown" Tai said of her trade negotiators. "And a federal government shutdown, the longer it lasts, the more impaired our ability to do these kinds of deals will be."
A small group of hard-right Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives — including North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop — have been threatening to withhold the votes needed for a new spending plan and shut down the government, urged on by former President Donald Trump.
"This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down,” GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said last week, the Associated Press reported.
On Tuesday, responding to a social media post about federal government spending, Bishop tweeted a scene from the 2008 Batman movie "The Dark Knight" in which the antagonist, the Joker, burns a large pile of money.
Republicans hold a slim majority in the U.S. House. That means the group of holdouts, though small, has just enough votes to potentially shut down the government — unless GOP leadership is able to either win them back or convince enough Democratic members of Congress to sign on.
As for the turkey talks on Tuesday in Raleigh, they included a stop to visit "Chocolate" and "Chip," the two turkeys Biden pardoned last year at Thanksgiving. They were raised in North Carolina before being sent to the White House for the annual tradition of a turkey pardon, and they're now living out their retirement at the N.C. State turkey center south of Raleigh.
In a sign of North Carolina's prominence as both a turkey-producing state and politically relevant swing state, Trump also pardoned a locally raised turkey one year. So did his predecessor, Democratic President Barack Obama.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
