After months of brinkmanship, the Trump administration’s trade war with China is officially under way, writes Andrew Egger on WeeklyStandard.com. The White House on Friday slapped $34 billion in tariffs on Chinese products; China responded immediately with $34 billion of its own. For much of the country, it’s a worrisome turn: a lengthy tit-for-tat would threaten to squelch an economy that has prospered so far under President Trump’s watch. But for America’s farmers, that possibility is already a harsh reality—the extension of a months-long struggle that already has them on the ropes.
China is targeting agriculture in its retaliatory tariffs for two reasons: because farm country is politically precious territory for the president, and because farmers, who operate with high costs, narrow profits, and harvest cycles that demand long-term economic projection, are deeply vulnerable to instability and price monkeying. And China, as the world’s largest agricultural importer, can monkey a lot. The corn market hit its yearlong high in late May, when Trump announced that China had agreed to a blockbuster trade deal that would include a huge increase in the purchase of American agriculture products, and that the trade war was thus on hold. But the White House reversed itself days later, and prices have been falling ever since. As China shifts its purchasing elsewhere, farmers in other countries are reveling in the unexpected windfall: export soybean prices have skyrocketed in Brazil in the last two months, even as they have cratered to a near decade low in the United States.
Read more at WeeklyStandard.com.
