USMEF Honors Vetter, Gustafson for Contributions to Meat Trade

USMEF honored two individuals who’ve played very different but extremely important roles in the development of U.S. red meat exports and global meat trade. Ambassador Darci Vetter, chief agricultural negotiator for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), was presented with the Mansfield J. Award. Mark Gustafson, a longtime meat industry leader and international trade specialist who spent part of his early career with USMEF, received USMEF’s Distinguished Service Award. The awards were presented Nov. 3 at USMEF’s 40th Anniversary & Strategic Planning Conference in Carlsbad, California.

The Mansfield award is named for former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Michael J. Mansfield, a Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree whose five decades of government service formed the foundation for advancement of U.S. trade relations throughout the world.

Vetter spoke about her passion for advancing global trade and told the audience the biggest challenge and the highest honor of her career was being able to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). She credited USMEF with being a solid resource in ongoing efforts to effectively negotiate trade agreements.

“In a negotiation with a country like Japan, every detail is important, and you couldn’t just say let’s do ‘x’ for beef and ‘x’ for pork,” she explained. “You really had to go product by product, and so the experience USMEF brings to the table in telling us what you can sell, what’s competitive, and in what ways you can tailor that product completely revolutionized the way we conducted that negotiation so we were able to get the most value for all of you. And so it was very rewarding to finish that part of the negotiation, knowing that it was tailored to get the best deal possible. That would not have happened without our partnership with USMEF.”

Receiving the USMEF Distinguished Service Award, presented to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the pursuit of USMEF’s export goals, is something Gustafson said he never could have imagined early in his career, in what he referred to as “the frontier days” of global meat trade.

Having recently launched the consulting firm Gustafson & Associates – after 38 years working to advance red meat exports for JBS, Swift and Company, ConAgra International, USMEF and Monfort of Colorado – Gustafson pointed to the support he received and the collaboration of groups determined to expand exports of U.S. beef, pork and lamb.

Ambassador Darci Vetter and Mark Gustafson were honored with USMEF’s Michael J. Mansfield Award and Distinguished Service Award

“It was such an honor for me to be able to deal with all the people in the nine sectors of USMEF who had the same passion for agriculture that I had,” Gustafson said. “But the key was that we didn’t know exactly where we were going at the time, so we had to have strong leadership to say ‘everybody here has a role to play to get this thing done.’ The first major trade agreement was really the beef and citrus agreement with Japan in 1988. With that agreement in place, we were able to show customers the difference between U.S. beef and domestic beef, and we really developed a foothold in the Japanese market.”

Throughout his career, Gustafson has been active in addressing trade barriers and shaping the meat industry’s approach to international marketing. He has chaired the USMEF Exporter Committee and served on the USMEF Executive Committee, the Agricultural Trade Advisory Committee for Animals and Animal Products, the USDA Advisory Committee for Meat and Poultry Inspection and the North American Meat Institute’s Trade Committee.