Defenders of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China have insisted that American farmers will be better off in the longrun, and the White House recently announced it would be giving farmers an additional $16 billion in aid to help them cope with the trade war’s effects. But in a report for Yahoo Finance this week, journalist Adriana Belmonte stresses that American farmers have a problem that farm aid isn’t going to cure: they’re lost their markets.
China, Belmonte notes, purchased a lot of American farm products in the past, from wheat to soybeans. In 2016 and 2017, for example, China imported 61 million bushels of wheat from the United States. But thanks to the trade war, Belmonte reports, China is importing from other countries instead, including wheat from Russia and soybeans from Brazil.
Bob Kuylen, a North Dakota wheat farmer, told Yahoo Finance, “This trade thing is what’s brought on by the president, and it’s really frustrating because he took away all of our markets. We live in an area where we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. It costs us a lot of money: over $1 a bushel to get our grain to markets.”
View the complete August 1 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.