“Recent estimates indicate damages to the U.S.
The spokesperson said Trump is trying to “fix broken trade deals and ensure all Americans enjoy free and fair trade with countries around the world,” touting the new USMCA pact, partial agreements with China and Japan and ongoing negotiations with the European Union and the United Kingdom. Perdue himself has said there wasn’t enough aid to go around, forcing USDA to leave entire sectors out of its coronavirus relief program, like ethanol producers who shuttered half of their nationwide operations because of plunging fuel consumption.Ī USDA spokesperson defended the aid programs as necessary to offset other nations' “unfair and illegal trade retaliation” against farmers. Even as the cost of beef climbed at grocery stores during the pandemic, for example, the money wasn’t reaching cattle ranchers who received unusually low prices for their livestock from meatpackers. But bipartisan lawmakers are now calling for adding as much as $50 billion to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s arsenal in the next stimulus package to help producers stung by supply chain disruptions.įarm industry groups and their allies on Capitol Hill argue the money is needed to stem the steep losses after many of the biggest food purchasers, like schools and restaurants, stopped buying.
USDA is currently distributing $16 billion in farm rescue payments, on top of standard farm bill subsidies, plus another round of trade bailout checks earlier this year. Under the Obama administration, total direct payments to farmers ranged from $9.8 billion to nearly $13 billion per year.īut under Trump, the trade bailout and coronavirus relief efforts have pushed farm spending to more than twice that level, with far more in the pipeline. We’ll buy our way out of this.’”īecause agriculture is both high-risk and vital to the food supply, the government has long been in the business of helping farmers and ranchers manage economic downturns, natural disasters and other headwinds Congress routinely passes farm bills that include a suite of subsidies, conservation incentives, crop insurance and other safety net programs. “Rather than suffering any consequence for the ill-conceived strategy, they just said, ‘Hey, let’s tap the bank. “The administration picked these trade fights promising agriculture that this would lead to some better world at some point,” Hamilton said. Instead, the money was funneled through USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Depression-era agency that can borrow from the U.S. The trade bailout has now spanned three years and surpassed $23 billion, even though it was never appropriated by Congress. Farm sales to China plummeted from $19.5 billion in 2017 to just $9 billion the next year as producers continued to hemorrhage profits in 2019, farm bankruptcies jumped nearly 20 percent last year. The spending surge began in mid-2018 when USDA started writing checks to farmers and ranchers to pay for the damage from Trump’s trade war, which brought about higher tariffs that crushed agricultural exports and commodity prices.
It’s not a crazy idea to ask what the public’s getting from this, or could the public expect more for it.” “But at the end of the day, it’s your and my tax money. “It’s just, ‘Here’s your check.’ There’s an incredible amount of trust that will use it wisely,” he said. It’s a problem for taxpayers, too: The size, speed and lack of scrutiny of the payments should concern the public, says Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor and former director of Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center. “It’s really difficult once you’re giving farmers this much money to then take away those. “It’s a big problem for agriculture because it’s not sustainable,” said Anne Schechinger, senior economics analyst at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog organization. The massive payments have been a political boon to Trump in farm country - he tweeted in January that he hoped the money would be “the thing they will most remember” - but risk creating a culture of dependency, as farmers and ranchers work the bonus subsidies into their financial plans when making large, up-front investments in seed, feed and farm machinery.
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