President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to create a task force designed to promote agriculture and rural prosperity in America.
Trump will meet with members of the agriculture industry including Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, Zippy Duvall, the president of the American Farm Bureau, and various farmers and ranchers to discuss the issues facing the industry.
"We will be asking Secretary Perdue to establish a task force that does a 180-day review of regulation and policy, legislation that unnecessarily hinders economic growth in the agriculture area," said Ray Starling, the special assistant to the president for agriculture.
"All of these things are over issues that those of us in agriculture see as potential limiting factors economically and things that we need to address," he said.
Starling said the executive order will sunset the current makeup of the White House Rural Council, which was created by the Obama administration in 2012. The council intended to improve the effectiveness of federal programs that serve rural America, promote private-sector partnerships, and engage stakeholders on rural issues.
"One of the things we will ask the task force to do is to take a look at the need to create another body along those lines, what would that even look like and how could it be most effective," Starling said.
The task force will be charged with looking at rural communities and making recommendations on what can be done to improve their economic stability.
"We do believe that in these rural communities the best thing we can do to make them grow quickly and economically is to focus on agriculture because it is the number one driver in these rural communities," Starling said.
Starling said that this would be the biggest agriculture meeting so early in a president's administration since the Reagan era.
"To say that this has been a while would be an understatement," he said. "The last thing I would cover on the roundtable is that we certainly expect a wide range of options to come up as evidenced by the wide range of folks who will be attending the meeting."