Oct 17th DC Brief

A 6.30am breakfast, and another early start to the day, which was good as we were nearly all still on Paris time and awoke at 5am anyway.

Hope Pjesky, an Eisenhower fellowship holder, was our guide for Washington DC. Through her contacts on Capital Hill she organised four excellent briefings for us today.

The first, over breakfast Hope gave us some good background information to Agriculture and politics in the USA, bringing everyone up to speed and increasing the opportunity to gain more from our other briefings.

Next we went to the Australian embassy and were briefed by Australian and Newzealand officials on the current state of Agriculture and trade between the USA & Australia. We learnt about the opportunities that exist with the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), a trade deal between many countries in the Pacific region.

We visited the senate office building, where we were briefed on the new US farm bill and the multi peril crop insurance programme that forms a strategic part of this.

After walking past the Capital Building which is the United States parliament house we headed to the last meeting for the day in the House of Reps committee room. We heard another perspective on the Farm Bill and why it has not yet been adopted, also on Ag Research in the US, foreign ownership and  biotechnology safeguards in the US.