Farmers, Trump and China

America's farmers are feeling the pinch. 

U.S. farmers lost one of their biggest customers after China officially cancelled all purchases of U.S. agricultural products, a retaliatory move following President Donald Trump’s pledge to slap 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports.

China’s exit piles on to a devastating year for farmers, who have struggled through record flooding and an extreme heat wave that destroyed crop yields, and trade war escalations that have lowered prices and profits this year.

“It’s really, really getting bad out here,” said Bob Kuylen, who’s farmed for 35 years in North Dakota.
“Trump is ruining our markets. No one is buying our product no more, and we have no markets no more.”
Agriculture exports to China dropped by more than half last year. In 2017, China imported $19.5 billion in agricultural goods, making it the second-largest buyer overall for American farmers. In 2018, that dropped to $9.2 billion as the trade war escalated, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Kuylen, who farms roughly 1,500 acres of wheat and sunflowers, lost $70 per acre this year, despite growing good crops. Current government subsidies only cover about $15 per acre, he said.

“There’s no incentive to keep farming, except that I’ve invested everything I have in farming, and it’s hard to walk away,” he said.
“When four to five generations ahead of you have succeeded, and you come along and fail, you don’t see it as not your fault. You snap.”

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said China’s exit is a “body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by.” 

China has been the top buyer of US soybeans, and exports to China dropped 75 percent during the nine-month period from last September to last May.

And the bailouts that Trump has extended are not only economically self-defeating, they eat at a farmer's sense of self-worth:

Some farmers say the billions in bailouts and rounds of subsidies they’ve received thus far have failed to cover enough of their profit losses. Many say they’d rather make a profit in the marketplace than through a government program.
“I’m happy for the $16 billion, but I’d much rather get it from the marketplace,” Watne said. “The reality is I can’t. It’s going to be too little, too late for some farmers.”

It's true that China is a strategic rival of the US - a more formidable and ideologically foreign rival than we'd thought until recently - but playing games with the economic activity private citizens and organizations are engaged in is not an acceptable response.

The really pathetic spectacle is that of Trump's shills who lamely try to make protectionism - and some protectionism it's turning out to be - an aspect of conservatism.

Those same people would quite rightly be lambasting a Democrat president who was putting America's grain producers in this fix.