WASHINGTON—The United States is escalating its dispute with Canada over the sale of American dairy products north of the border.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s office says it wants a dispute settlement panel to examine whether Canada is unfairly keeping American producers from accessing the Canadian market.
The request is a significant ramp-up of American complaints about the way Canada is allocating access to the market under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
The U.S. is upset with how Canada is distributing its tariff-rate quotas—the quantities of certain dairy products that can be imported at lower duty levels.
The USTR says a large share of those quotas have been allocated to processors rather than producers, effectively denying U.S. farmers their fair share of the supply-managed Canadian market.
Canadian officials, however, insist that the allocations are perfectly in keeping with its commitments under the trade agreement, which took effect last July.
