Why Farmers Aren’t Going To Abandon Trump Over The Trade War
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
You’ve all seen the headlines: “China is hitting the U.S. where it hurts: Soybeans,” and “China takes aim at America’s soybean farmers,” and “Soybean farmers are still paying for Trump’s trade war” (all from CNN).
The popular narrative goes that because President Trump launched a trade war against China, China has retaliated by tariffing America’s chief export to China—agricultural products—which happen to mostly come from red states that voted for Trump. China is “crushing prices” with its retaliatory tariffs, says HBO’s Vice News. In other words, the media narrative goes, China is punishing Trump voters for being dumb enough to vote for a trade warrior.
Before the midterms, the media took its narrative one step further. Just about every mainstream media publication ran a story that said farmers may abandon Republicans because of Trump’s trade war. Quartz, for example, wrote: “New tariffs on pork exports have forced some U.S. hog producers to liquidate parts of their farming operations. One farmer who spoke to Reuters said Trump’s trade war with China cost him $200,000 this year, and that he regretted voting for Trump in 2016. He isn’t alone”.
In other words, “When will the dumb Trump-supporting farmers realize that they have been conned?” You can rest assured that this narrative will once again surface before 2020’s election. Except that none of it is true. American farmers are certainly hurting, but little of this is due to the trade war. The media is trying to take advantage of American farmers’ pain for political purposes.
China Has Long Restricted U.S. Ag Trade.
First of all, China long ago restricted imports of U.S. pork. According to Bloomberg, since 2011, America’s share of China’s pork imports fell from about 50 percent to less than 13 percent by 2016. China blamed this on “unsafe” U.S. pork, because most American pork producers supplement pigs’ diets with ractopamine, a safe additive fed to hogs several weeks before slaughter to help them bulk up with more lean meat.
Next, there’s a big reason that China is buying less soybeans, and it has nothing to do with the trade war. China’s pig population is being rocked by a terrible pig disease called African Swine Fever (ASF). What is ASF? ASF was first detected in Africa more than a century ago, but it has been spreading like wildfire in China since at least last year. There is no cure for ASF, and it kills well more than 90 percent of the pigs it infects in less than a week, via massive hemorrhaging. This is a gross, messy disease—think of Ebola, but for pigs.
The Pig and Soybean Stories Are Connected.
Because pork is such a staple in China, food inflation is going through the roof, which is a real problem for Chinese consumers and the communist government. It’s also a problem for the world’s soybean producers, because a staple of pigs’ diets is soybean meal.
--------------------------------------
By the way, China promised at the G-20 summit several weeks ago to buy more U.S. soybeans in exchange for Trump going easier on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. But China hasn’t bought significantly more soybeans since that time, precisely because it doesn’t need them.
On the other hand, China is upping its purchases of supposedly unsafe U.S. pork—again, because so many of its own pigs are dying. In fact, U.S. pork exports to China hit a record high earlier this year, even though China is levying a 62 percent tariff on pork from America.
--------------------------------------
The Corporate Media Gets It Wrong Every Day.
To recap, AFS is the primary reason China is buying less U.S. soybeans. Why isn’t the media reporting on this, and the risk that this disease comes to America?
Next, the big drop in soybean prices was in 2014, not 2018. Farmers truly are hurting, and that is almost entirely due to the consequences of the Fed’s QE programs. First, the Fed made it too easy to borrow and tricked farmers into thinking that long-term demand for their goods was much higher than it really was. Later, when QE ended, farmers were left overextended.
MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE, IF YOU READ THE SEEDED ARTICLE !
Tags
Who is online
543 visitors
"The amazing thing is that a chart of commodity prices doesn’t lie. But the corporate media insists on only telling a tenth of the story, if that. They don’t give a hoot about farmers, they are just looking for any way possible to hurt the president. If you haven’t learned this already, that tells you something about the corrupt state of the East Coast corporate media. You can’t believe anything they say."
They're going to support him anyway because they're morons? This 'president' sure does love the uneducated.
You didn't read the seed, did you !
Read?
Why read that when the progressives can simply recite MBFC approved media talking points?
using a biased third party site to decide what can be talked about?
pure insanity and nothing less.
besides a direct assault on the freedom of speech, all it boils down to is controlling the narrative.
and any that adopt such policy will wither and die. it is predictable.
time heals all wounds
Nice to see the WHOLE truth come out--not just some CNN or MSNBC headlines demeaning the President.
fake news for losers. no one else pays any attention to CNN or MSNBC
We just seem to always get "Some" of the story from "Reporters" !
Real "Journalists"....where are you ?
They are getting welfare and are dumb as dirt, of course they'll support the moron-in-chief.
At least they won't starve although soy bean diet 24/7 can get old.
Government paying Farmers makes Farmers dumb as dirt ?
Sounds like they "is really smart" for getting government to do that !
Obviously never met any of them, have you?
Also...haven't learned anything from 2016, have you?
They'll support him because the alternative is to support people from whom they receive ignorant contempt.
That would be Trump.
Riiiiight.
Trump is the one telling us all "they're getting welfare" and "they're dumb as dirt".
Trump is the one telling them "they're voting against their own interests", like some Millennial dipshit living with her parents knows "their interests" better than a guy who has been supporting his family for 40 years.
Riiiiiiight. That MUST be what it is.......
Farm subsidies are one of the better uses of our tax dollars it's just that some folks are just too plain dull to see that.
you don't like it that part of what the Chinese are paying in tariffs is going to US farmers to protect them from Chinese retaliation? And yes by devaluing their currency to make their products cheaper to maintain market share they are paying the tariff
This is bullshit. The Chinese are not paying the Tariffs, American businesses pay these additional taxes imposed by Trump on goods imported from China. Trump is picking winners and losers in his tariff nonsense by transferring the tariffs paid by some American businesses to prop up other 'favored' American businesses.
Ok, so I read the article. First he says the reason China is buying fewer farm products is because China is using the excuse that ractopamine used by the US pork industry to enhance lean meat production is unsafe. The US allows 50 ppm residual where the international Codex specifies a maximum of 10 ppb. Of course he fails to mention that Russia, the European Union, … have also stopped buying this pork for the same reason.
Then he says that African Swine Flu is killing a lot of pigs, and the Chinese don’t need as many soybeans to feed them. Then he goes into a discussion of how quantitive easing made the sale of farm products difficult. Complete with graphs showing the sales of farm products. Of course, the graphs actually depict the world’s recovery from the GWB recession.
In short, it just a big deflection. The ractopamine change happened in 2014. The African Swine Flu problem began in 2016. QE has been going on since 2008. But, magically, all this came together and resulted in the Chinese cutting off the buying of US farm products coincidentally immediately after Trump’s tariffs.
I mean really, Holy gullibility Batman.
50 ppm should be 50 ppb