Allen County farmers backing Donald Trump must have constitutions of steel to sign up for another trade war. Because that’s almost a certainty if the “I-love-tariffs” former president is reelected.
Just last week, Trump said he’s prepared to be even more aggressive by proposing tariffs up to 10 percent on most imports and more than 60 percent on Chinese goods.
If that comes to pass, corn and soybean exports can expect to drop by hundreds of millions of tons.
How do we know?
Because that’s what happened in Trump’s first term. And ever since, the United States has lost its status as a major exporter of crops and meat products.
Let’s turn back the clock for perspective.
In 2017, Trump complained the United States was getting the short end of the stick when it came to international trade. As a result, he enacted higher taxes on imports — tariffs — on our primary trading partners including China, Canada, the European Union, Mexico and India, first targeting solar cells and then steel, aluminum and car parts.
And to make it perfectly clear, when the U.S. slaps a tariff on a foreign country, the tariffs are paid entirely by U.S. importers, not the exporting countries.
Predictably, many of the affected countries imposed retaliatory tariffs primarily on U.S. exports of agriculture and food products, undermining our global competitiveness. From mid-2018 through 2019, the U.S. witnessed an estimated $27 billion decline in foreign sales, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
The trade war hit Kansas, Iowa and Illinois the hardest. Combined, the three states account for more than 50 percent of the region’s total agricultural exports primarily to China, Canada and Mexico.
Farm sales to China — our biggest customer — plummeted from $19.5 billion in 2017 to just $9 billion the next year. By 2018, U.S. soybean exports to China declined by 75 percent, according to the U.S. international Trade Commission. In 2019, farm bankruptcies jumped nearly 20 percent over the previous year.
During Trump’s administration, U.S. food and agricultural exports declined by an estimated $27 billion.
Meanwhile, countries that did not impose such tariffs — notably Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay — significantly expanded their trade with these nations, gaining more than $13.5 billion in additional trade.
The effort to regain that market access has proved a Sisyphean challenge. The U.S. has since ceded its status as the No. 1 exporter of corn and soybeans to Brazil; while Spain is now the No. 1 exporter of pork.
If Trump were to re-ignite the trade war with China, experts predict U.S. soybean exports would decline by 51.8 percent; corn by 84.3 percent.
