Arkansas lawmakers and rice farmers met yesterday with Cuban officials amid moves in Washington to ease the forty-year-old trade embargo. The sixteen-member delegation from Arkansas traveled to Havana, as the House of Representatives debates legislation that would allow food and medicine to be sold to Cuba. A vote by the full House is expected next week. The Senate overwhelmingly approved a similar trade measure last year, and now the House Appropriations Committee has approved the measure. Some 220 House members signed a letter supporting an easing of the embargo.

Arkansas is the United States’s number one rice producer, as well as an important supplier of poultry, pork and soybean. During the visit to Cuba, members of the Arkansas delegation were to tour an agricultural cooperative, a poultry farm and a farmer’s market.