Delta Farm News Quotes John Gilliland from National Cotton Council Speech
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John Gilliland, a consultant in the international trade practice at Akin Gump, has been quoted in the Delta Farm Press article “Renegotiating NAFTA: Easier said than done” from a speech he gave last month to the National Cotton Council’s board of directors.
The Trump administration, the article notes, is aggressively pursuing a timetable of completing a new NAFTA agreement by early 2018, but Gilliland says that could be a challenge. Congressional approval in the near term of a new agreement would present additional challenges. In particular, with the mid-term elections coming next year, a NAFTA vote, he said, could be “pretty dicey.” As a result, “you may be looking at either a lame duck 2018 vote or maybe even 2019, in which case you’d be in a new Congress.”
Gilliland said the agriculture community and the Cotton Council have been satisfied with the current NAFTA and have urged the administration to take a “do no harm approach” in negotiations for agriculture. Administration officials, he noted, have said they recognize that and it is their goal “to do for some of the non-agriculture sectors, manufacturing, for example, what NAFTA has done for U.S. agricultural exporters. So that will be their focus.”
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