With a new president and Congress preparing to take office, it's a good time to remind our elected officials how opening foreign markets raises U.S. dairy exports and helps our U.S. economy.

The president signed TPA legislation in June; now it's up to USTR to bring home a beneficial dairy deal.

Every U.S. bilateral and regional free trade agreement the United States has signed in recent years has led to increased dairy exports.

The threat is very real and obviously escalating, as any glance at the past six months’ events will attest.

U.S. dairy exports to the European Union (EU) averaged around $87 million per year for the past five years. Annual EU dairy shipments to the United States averaged more than $1.1 billion over that same period.

When the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement (FTA) went into effect in March, it opened many doors to U.S. cheese suppliers. A few, however, remained shut—not from latent protectionist fears of the Koreans, as we might have originally feared, but the strategic maneuvering of the European Commission, which is in charge of policy and negotiating agreements for the European Union (EU).

The United States justifiably calls for other nations to live up to the terms of negotiated free trade agreements. Those calls ring hollow when we refuse to live up to our own freely negotiated trade commitments, specifically, in this case, the cross-border trucking requirements mandated in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).