Shanghai Daily: Business - shanghaidaily.com
A FIGHT is on in Congress over whether to assess fees on dairy imports to help pay for promoting homegrown dairy products in the United States. It pits dairy farmers against big-name US food companies, cheese importers, foreign countries - and even the outlying US areas of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The Bush administration never implemented a dairy-import assessment approved by Congress in 2002 because the Agriculture Department concluded the fees could create the appearance of favorable treatment. The fees on domestic producers are levied only on dairy farmers in the 48 contiguous states, which exclude the states of Hawaii and Alaska as well as US territories. This year, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Democratic Representative Collin Peterson, inserted a measure into the 2007 farm bill that would extend the mandatory fee to dairy farmers in Hawaii and Alaska (ranked 48th and 50th in dairy production, respectively) and Puerto Rico, a Caribbean US