Roberts hopes to change Trump’s view on Pacific trade deal

HUTCHINSON – Sen. Pat Roberts said Saturday that he thinks presidential politics will scuttle the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact this year, but he thinks he might be able to bring Republican candidate Donald Trump around to supporting at least the agriculture portion of the deal.

“This particular agreement is absolutely important for us,” said Roberts, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee and an adviser to Trump, whose campaign has been largely fueled by opposition to international trade agreements.

“We have to export our products,” Roberts said. “One third of every acre (of farm crops) has to go somewhere, and right now it’s going on the ground.”

Roberts appeared on stage at the Kansas State Fair on Saturday in a rare joint appearance with Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, the House agriculture chairman.

Conaway said the agricultural aspect of TPP is good for U.S. farmers, but he acknowledged there’s opposition to the pact because of civil- and human-rights issues in some of the member countries.

But he said Kansas farmers should not become discouraged by what he called a “hiccup” in the march toward more open trade around the Pacific.

“We can’t create an economic model where we can just close off our borders (and) swap stuff among ourselves … it doesn’t work,” he said.

The TPP is designed to bring down trade barriers among a dozen countries on the Pacific Rim, and most congressional Republicans and some Democrats favor it.

But it has become a slippery political football in the current presidential campaign, threatening the congressional approval required for the pact to take effect.

Opposition to the partnership has been a rallying point in the 2016 campaign, especially for supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Those two slammed the plan as a giveaway that will cost jobs in the United States by forcing workers here to compete more with low-wage labor in some of the partnership’s member countries.

Trump has called TPP a “terrible deal” that he wants to abandon. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who supported the concept while she was secretary of state, says she wants to renegotiate some parts of the final TPP agreement.

“I think the chances of passage for this agreement are not very good in 2016,” Roberts said. “The political situation is such that both candidates for president obviously have different views than maybe we do here.”

But he said he thinks he could make Trump see the light on TPP’s benefit to domestic agriculture if Trump is elected.

“The agricultural portion is good, and I think that Mr. Trump understands that,” Roberts said. “There’s a lot of other things he objects to and it’s like, what, 2,000 pages?

“So you go through it and say, this is good for ag, how can we work with other things with regards to the environment and international labor laws? Sovereign countries really don’t like to get into that.”

The countries that would be included in the deal are Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and Brunei.

Roberts said if the U.S. doesn’t move on TPP, it runs the risk of being edged out by smaller agreements among Pacific Rim countries and an increasingly aggressive Chinese trade presence.

“China is right behind us like Pac-Man, a giant Pac-Man,” he said.

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 2:24 PM with the headline "Roberts hopes to change Trump’s view on Pacific trade deal."