In what could impact Nebraska’s $700 million-plus pork industry, the National Pork Producers Council expressed strong disappointment with the U.S. and Mexican governments’ actions related to allowing Mexican trucks into the United States.

According to NPPC, Mexico Monday added pork to the list of U.S. products against which it is retaliating for the failure of the United States to live up to its obligations under the North American Free Trade Agreement to let Mexican trucks haul goods into the United States.

 “Mexico’s retaliation against U.S. pork will have negative economic consequences for America’s pork producers,” said NPPC President Sam Carney, a producer from Adair, Iowa. “We are extremely disappointed that our top volume export market has taken this action, but we’re more disappointed that the United States is not living up to its trade obligations.”

 Carney said that failure “not only has hurt dozens of U.S. industries economically, but it could prompt other countries to think twice about entering into trade deals with the United States.

“Our trading partners need assurance that the United States will live up to its trade obligations,” he said.

 He said the U.S. Congress in early March 2009 failed to renew a pilot program that allowed a limited number of Mexican trucks to haul freight into United States beyond a 25-mile commercial zone. The Cross-Border Trucking Pilot Program was started by the U.S. Department of Transportation in September 2007 as a way to begin implementing the NAFTA trucking provision, which was supposed to take effect in December 1995.

 In February 2001, Carney said a NAFTA dispute-settlement panel ruled that excluding Mexican trucks violated U.S. obligations under the trade deal. The ruling gave Mexico the right to retaliate against U.S. products, which it did in March 2009, placing higher tariffs on more than $2.4 billion of U.S. goods. Pork was not included on that initial retaliation list.

“Mexico is a top market for all kinds of U.S. exports, providing millions of jobs to U.S. workers,” said Carney. “The retaliation puts thousands of agricultural jobs at risk, including, now, pork industry jobs, and thousands of manufacturing jobs at risk.”

Mexico last year bought $762 million of U.S. pork. In 2009, Nebraska ranked 6th in the nation in the number of hogs and pigs on the farm and seventh in hog slaughter.