Farmers alert! Bad Donald Trump cruel trade

“I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…”


Tom Joad*, the Depression-era character in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” doesn’t get to complete his sentence. He’s interrupted by his mother, who begs him not to do something rash that would lead to another dirt-poor farmer being “cut down.”

This isn’t the Depression, but many of America’s farmers feel like they’re in one.

Net farm income this year is expected to be 50 percent less than it was just six years ago. It might get worse if President Trump doesn’t change his trade war tactics against China and Mexico, which threaten to increase farm bankruptcies beyond the current average of 500 a year.

Farmers have suffered the brunt of retaliatory tariffs China has imposed on U.S. products. They have been wringing their hands as the Chinese turn to other countries to purchase commodities they once bought from the United States. Brazil has taken America’s place supplying soybeans to China, which has also canceled a large purchase of U.S. pork products. The longer it takes American farmers to get their best customer back, the harder it will be.

Trump acknowledged the importance of rural voters to his political base when he scrounged up $12 billion in taxpayer money last year to bail out farmers suffering from China’s retaliatory tariffs. Last month, he announced another $16 billion bailout for farmers. Farmers are swallowing their pride and applying for bailout money, but it’s not enough. Their bottom lines have also been hurt by cold, wet weather that delayed spring planting and recent storms that have caused severe flooding in the Midwest. Commodity prices, too, have failed to return to post-drought highs early this decade.

Farmers may be turning on the Trump cruel trade policies

More than 11,000 Texas farmers signed up for last year’s bailout. That number may grow this year. The program was expanded to include a wider range of crops and livestock after complaints that soybean farmers got more than their fair share of last year’s bailout. Corn farmers said their payout netted them only about a penny a bushel. Other farmers were left out entirely.

You would think farmers’ patience with Trump would be exhausted by now. Not so, says Laramie Adams, national legislative director for the Texas Farm Bureau. He says the bureau keeps in close contact with its members and while they have voiced frustration with the president, they remain committed to him -- at least for now. “Farmers and ranchers are some of the most patient folks you can find,” said Adams, “but it’s getting harder and harder to be patient.”

Adams said Texas farmers are very concerned about Trump’s move to impose new tariffs on Mexico to force it to do more to prevent Central Americans from making it to the U.S. border. That move could derail the proposed U.S.-Mexico-Canada pact to replace the outdated North American Free Trade Agreement. Without a viable NAFTA replacement, American farmers and manufacturers will lose even more market share. Last year, Texas exported $110 billion in agricultural and other goods to Mexico, four times as much as to second-place Canada. As for Houston, it exports goods worth almost as much in 2017 as the combined totals from Dallas, El Paso, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, and Austin, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Adams said Texas farmers also are being hurt by a lack of migrant agricultural workers due to current immigration policies. “It has not been an easy time,” he said. “But farmers are staying strong and trying to make the best of it. They realize something needs to be done to hold other countries accountable in terms of trade and immigration.”

It’s not just Texas farmers who are sticking with Trump, even though he seems to be favoring another segment of his base, blue-collar workers, who have long complained that U.S. trade policies send jobs overseas. An Agri-Pulse telephone poll in November of 600 commercial farmers nationally showed 79 percent either strongly or somewhat approve of Trump. Compare that with the 41 percent approval rating Trump received in a recent Quinnipiac University national poll.

More farmers need to have a Tom Joad moment and realize they must stand up for themselves.

They can’t keep putting their trust in a president who dishes out welfare checks to keep them quiet. America’s farmers have become Trump’s pawns in a chess match with China that could leave them worse off than they were when the trade war began. Some Republican senators have finally found the gumption to oppose Trump’s ill-conceived, mercurial trade policies. 

Farmers need to speak up too - before it’s too late.

*The Grapes of Wrath by John Stienbeck, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work