Despite their concerns, some farm operators still support the former president and prefer his overall economic plan.
To former President Donald J. Trump, “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.
But to farmers in rural America, the blanket import duties that Mr. Trump wants to enact if elected are a nightmare that they would rather not live through again.
As president, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs in 2018 and 2019 on $300 billion of Chinese imports, a punishment he wielded in order to get China to negotiate a trade deal with the United States. His action triggered a trade war between Washington and Beijing, with China slapping retaliatory tariffs on American products. It also shifted more of its soybean purchases to Brazil and Argentina, hurting U.S. soybean farmers who had long relied on the Chinese market.
When Mr. Trump finally announced a limited trade deal in 2019, American farmers were frazzled and subsisting on subsidies that the Trump administration had handed out to keep them afloat.
Now it could happen all over again.
“The prospect of additional tariffs doesn’t sound good,” said Leslie Bowman, a corn and soybean farmer from Chambersburg, Pa. “The idea of tariffs is to protect U.S. industries, but for the agricultural industry, it’s going to hurt.”
The support of farmers in swing states such as Pennsylvania could be pivotal in determining the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Mr. Trump remains popular in rural America, and voters such as Mr. Bowman say they are weighing a variety of factors as they consider whom to vote for.
Mr. Trump has said that if he wins the election he will put tariffs as high as 50 percent on imports from around the world. Tariffs on Chinese imports could be even higher, and some foreign products would face levies upward of 200 percent. Economists have warned that such tariffs could reignite inflation, slow economic growth and harm the industries that Mr. Trump says he wants to help.
American agricultural groups, bracing for the worst, have been warning against the kinds of tariffs that Mr. Trump envisions.
China is the biggest market for U.S. soybean exports and a major buyer of corn. A study published this month, commissioned by the American Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association, found that a new trade war with China could cause U.S. soybean and corn exports to China to drop once again.
If China retaliated with a 60 percent tariff on U.S. corn, soybeans and soybean products, American soybean and corn growers could lose as much as $7.3 billion in combined annual production value. That economic hit would reverberate beyond the farmers themselves, affecting other sectors that provide services to farms or rely on what they grow.
“A trade war would not only reduce the value of production for U.S. farmers but also have a ripple effect throughout the U.S. economy,” the report said.
Former President Donald J. Trump discussed his fondness for tariffs at a campaign event moderated by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas in Flint, Mich., in September.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The trade war with China, which lasted from 2018 to 2019, resulted in billions of dollars of lost revenue for American farmers. To help offset the losses, Mr. Trump handed out $23 billion in subsidies from a fund that the Department of Agriculture created to stabilize the farm sector. But that attempt to mitigate the damage was not viewed as a total success. Large farm operations and farmers in the south benefited the most, fueling concerns about fairness and leaving some farmers feeling cheated.
A second trade war could once again require Mr. Trump to compensate farmers — a reality that could complicate his stated plan to use tariff revenue to replace tax revenue.
An analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations found that 92 percent of the tariff proceeds that the U.S. collected during the trade war with China were redirected to bail out farmers who had been harmed by retaliation.
The end result of Mr. Trump’s trade war — an initial agreement by China to purchase an additional $200 billion of U.S. products — also did not live up its expectations.
The pandemic disrupted global supply chains in 2020 and, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China only bought about 83 percent of the U.S. farm products that it had committed to purchasing through 2021.
The Trump campaign, in a statement, called Mr. Trump’s tariffs a success and accused Ms. Harris of leaving rural America behind.
Renegotiating the trade deal that Mr. Trump reached with China in 2019 will likely be a top priority if he wins a second term.
John Paulson, an adviser and fund-raiser for the Trump campaign, suggested in an interview that Mr. Trump would not immediately unleash across-the-board tariffs but that he would first seek to strike deals to ensure that American exporters were being treated fairly by other countries.
“There needs to be, first, negotiation to try and level the playing field, and then if we can’t negotiate, then it’s time for targeted tariffs,” said Mr. Paulson, the hedge-fund billionaire who is under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary.
He added that he does not believe the two countries should disengage.
“I don’t think we can decouple,” Mr. Paulson said, noting that the U.S. and Chinese economies are reliant on each other in many ways. “We do have to reset the table so that trade policy is not one-sided and there’s a reciprocity to it and that it benefits Americans as well as it does China.”
How to approach trade with China would likely be a subject of intense debate in a Trump White House, as it was last time.
Peter Navarro, who served as Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, said in an interview that Mr. Trump would ensure that American farmers are protected from any retaliation against U.S. tariffs with more subsidies.
“He would do exactly what he did before and then some, if any farmer is threatened again,” Mr. Navarro said while riding a campaign bus across Pennsylvania. “Provide them with the financial resources they need to stay whole.”
Unlike Mr. Paulson, Mr. Navarro said that the U.S. should skip negotiations with China and move directly ahead with more tariffs.
At an event with farmers in Pennsylvania in September, Mr. Trump said that he would take a blunt approach to resuming economic talks if he wins, calling China’s president, Xi Jinping, and telling him, “You have to honor the deal you made.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has said little about agriculture or how she would handle trade with China if she wins the election. She has criticized Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs as taxes on consumers and when she was running to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2019, she lamented that the trade wars had left farmers with soybeans “rotting in bins.”
Despite their concerns about Mr. Trump’s trade policies, the farmers who would bear the brunt if he followed through don’t necessarily oppose the former president.
John Fleming, a soybean farmer from North Carolina, said that he was bracing for the possibility of more tariffs, which he expects would cause some “short-term pain.”
While Mr. Fleming, a Republican, declined to say who he would vote for, he said that he prefers Mr. Trump’s policies on taxes and environmental regulation. He expected Mr. Trump to win North Carolina, a key swing state.
“Lots of farmers look at the deregulation — that’s extremely valuable to us — and hopefully a more friendly tax policy,” said Mr. Fleming, who is on the board of the North Carolina Soybean Producers Association.
As for another trade war, Mr. Fleming added: “The only thing we can do is mind our own expenses.”
Carl Sousek, who grows soybeans, corn and wheat in Prague, Neb., recalls the last trade war between the U.S. and China as having a “direct effect” on his farm’s bottom line and said that it inflicted economic pain across rural America.
However, he was critical of the Biden administration for not doing more to enforce the trade deal that Mr. Trump had reached with China, and for maintaining most of the Trump administration’s trade policies.
“It’s been crickets for almost four years on these trade deals,” said Mr. Sousek, who resides in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. The state accords each state its own electoral college vote.
Although Mr. Sousek hopes that Mr. Trump will “put the brakes” on some of his tariff plans, he said that he still plans for vote for him.
“I try to look at the big picture,” Mr. Sousek said of Mr. Trump’s economic plans. “I think, in general, Trump’s approach to things would be much more positive.”
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