Farmers and ranchers caught in the middle of Trump’s trade wars

The past few years have been trying times for America’s farmers and ranchers. As President Trump’s trade war with China drags on with no end in sight, the outlook for the American agricultural sector, deeply dependent on expanded market access abroad, gets ever bleaker. Within a few days of his inauguration, Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a promising trade pact between Pacific Rim nations that would have been a boon for domestic agriculture. By cutting agricultural tariffs and reducing quotas, the TPP made significant progress in opening notoriously closed Asian markets. The remaining TPP countries moved forward with the agreement after the U.S. withdrawal. As a consequence, American farmers and ranchers now face higher barriers than their competitors in lucrative markets like Japan. As if that weren’t bad enough, American farmers and ranchers face an uncertain future in China’s enormous market. The Trump administration correctly identified legitimate problems with China’s trade policy practices in last year’s report by the U.S. Trade Representative, including cyberintrusions into commercial networks, theft of trade secrets, intellectual property abuses, and forced technology transfer, among other charges. But rather than use the report’s findings to pursue a thoughtful, comprehensive strategy with like-minded allies, the Trump administration waged an aggressive, undisciplined tariff war that has done little to change Beijing’s behavior while imposing big costs on Americans. Despite the president’s claims, American consumers, families, and businesses, are paying the tariffs, which have triggered predictable retaliation from Beijing that has fallen particularly hard on American agriculture. In 2017, the year before the trade war began, Chinese buyers imported approximately $19.5 billion worth of American farm products. In 2018, due to Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs, American farmers and ranchers sent less than half that amount to China (a little more than $9 billion). Soybean exports to China, for instance, fell from approximately $12.2 billion in 2017 to $3.1 billion in 2018. Likewise Bloomberg recently reported, “U.S. farm income dropped 16 percent last year to $63 billion, about half the level it was as recently as 2013.”...MORE