An internal budget document by the Donald Trump administration outlines a plan to cut funding to the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration this fiscal year. The document, sent to the House and Senate appropriations committees last week and obtained by Politico, offers detailed recommendations to make $18 billion of cuts in spending legislation that lawmakers must enact by April 28th to avoid a government shutdown. The cuts are aimed at the last five months of the current fiscal year and would compound the 21 percent proposed reduction for USDA that the administration included in its 2018 budget outline. The proposal includes a $40 million cut to the FDA, a $363 million cut from the Food for Peace program, a $136 million cut to eliminate funding for the McGovern-Dole food program and a $49 million cut to Rural Business and Cooperative Grant Programs.

The Senate Agriculture Committee will hold a business meeting Wednesday to consider the nomination of Sonny Perdue as Agriculture Secretary. Committee Chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, announced the meeting Tuesday. A favorable vote for Perdue will move the former Georgia Governor a step closer to taking his post at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s unclear, however, whether the full Senate will then move to confirm Perdue before it leaves for its two-week April recess at the end of next week. The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reports that if senators don’t get to Perdue before they leave, he won’t be able to get sworn in until the last week of April, at the earliest. When asked if the Senate will confirm Perdue before the Easter break, Chairman Roberts replied: “Hope springs eternal.”

Bans on meat imports from Brazil following the announced investigation into alleged bribery over meat safety issues were short-lived as China, Chile and Egypt have resumed imports from Brazil. Meat industry publication Meatingplace reports the temporary bans by the three nations were lifted over the weekend. However, meat purchases from the processing plants under investigation will remain suspended. The countries were among more than a dozen nations that have restricted purchases from Brazil, following the March 17th announcement of an investigation into alleged corruption involving 33 public sanitary inspectors and 21 meat processing plants. The decisions to resume purchases brings some relief to the Brazilian meat industry, which accumulated millions of dollars in losses last week due to the temporary bans. China alone is the second largest importer of Brazilian poultry and the third largest buyer of pork.

Singapore will push forward to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a change from other nations taking a wait and see approach after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the trade agreement. While the effort may be mostly symbolic, it does signal to other TPP nations that Singapore is still open to the agreement without the United States. Singapore’s Prime Minister said during a visit to TPP member nation Viet Nam last week that “Singapore is proceeding with the ratification,” according to online publication World Trade News. After Trump’s move, Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry had said that it would be focusing on other regional trade initiatives as TPP cannot come into effect in its current state. A Singapore trade official says that ratifying TPP is an effort by the country to “study the new balance of benefits” with other TPP members. Singapore is interested in either bilateral deals with TPP member countries or implementing TPP without the United States. U.S. agricultural exports included in the trade agreement were estimated to be worth $4 billion.

Mexico is mulling over drafting trade agreements that offer Brazil and Argentina duty-free access to the Mexican market for corn. Mexico is the world’s biggest buyer of U.S. corn, and the potential move by Mexico is seen as a shift away from American imports, according to DTN. An eagerness to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement by President Donald Trump has corn buyers in Mexico concerned and exploring other options. Trump has called NAFTA unfair to the U.S. and has vowed to renegotiate the deal or walk away. Mexico currently imports 98 percent of its corn from the U.S. and total U.S. farm sales to Mexico were worth an estimated $17.7 billion last year, five times greater than when NAFTA came into force. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says corn imports by Mexico from the U.S. were worth $2.3 billion in 2015.

The National Chicken Council filed comments with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration that explained why the interim and final rules proposed are bad for their industry. The NCC calls the rules “ill-advised,” saying they would cost American agriculture billions of dollars in economic damage, exceed GIPSA’s authority, and represent an arbitrary abuse of federal authority. NCC President Mike Brown says in the comments that GIPSA failed to provide any justification for the sweeping rule changes forced upon the poultry industry. “GIPSA doesn’t explain what benefits would offset the billions of dollars in harm this will cause the American economy,” Brown says. “The agency also fails to take into account the negative effect on consumers, innovation, competition, and even food safety.” Brown says his organization is particularly concerned about a potential storm of litigation that may result from the new rules. He says the new rules appear designed to create uncertainty and litigation, saying that even GIPSA admits costly litigation will ensue. Eight different Courts of Appeals have rejected a key part of the new rules which say a litigant would need to prove competitive injury to demonstrate a violation.

The National Biodiesel Board Thursday filed an antidumping and countervailing duty petition, making the case that Argentine and Indonesian companies are violating trade laws by flooding the U.S. market with dumped and subsidized biodiesel. The petition was filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission on behalf of the National Biodiesel Board Fair Trade Coalition, which is made up of the National Biodiesel Board and U.S. biodiesel producers. NBB leadership says the “this is a simple case where companies in Argentina and Indonesia are getting advantages that cheat U.S. trade laws and are counter to fair competition.” Because of illegal trade activities, biodiesel imports from Argentina and Indonesia surged by 464 percent from 2014 to 2016, according to NBB. That growth has taken 18.3 percentage points of market share from U.S. manufacturers. This is not the first time that Argentine and Indonesian biodiesel producers have been charged with violating international trade laws. In 2013, the European Union imposed 41.9 to 49.2 percent duties on Argentina and 8.8 to 23.3 percent duties on Indonesia. Just last year, Peru imposed both antidumping and countervailing duties on Argentine biodiesel.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week said no tainted meat from Brazil had entered the United States. The comments follow last week’s findings of a bribery scheme at Brazilian meat packing plants to entice inspectors to turn a blind eye to tainted meat and sanitary issues. USDA says that while none of the slaughter or processing facilities implicated in the Brazilian scandal have shipped meat products to the United States, the Food Safety and Inspection Service immediately instituted additional pathogen testing of all shipments of raw beef and ready-to-eat products from Brazil upon hearing reports of the investigation. FSIS has also increased its examination of all these products at ports-of-entry across the country. The agency will indefinitely maintain its 100 percent re-inspection and pathogen testing of all lots of FSIS-regulated products imported from Brazil.