Tariffs were meant to help but Pa. farmers are hurting under Trump tariffs
In all of his 30 years of farming, Rick Mains has never seen a harvest season as bad as the one that just wrapped up.
For starters, mother nature didn’t cooperate. The growing season was one of the wettest on record. Well into December, Mains still had crops out on the fields - as well as water.
“There’s water running in the field where I‘ve only seen once in lifetime,” said Mains, a soybean grower in Newville, two weeks ago.
To make matters worse, Mains had to contend with an unexpected and major economic curveball.
Like soybean farmers all across the country, he witnessed the decimation of the $14-billion soybean market after China, the country’s biggest soybean buyer, shut out the U.S. market with retaliatory tariffs.
It was just one of many fallouts from the tariffs that President Trump this year imposed on imported steel and aluminum. The tariffs sparked a trade war with the biggest U.S. trade partners - Canada, the European Union and China - all of which retaliated with tariffs of billions of dollars worth of exported goods and agricultural commodities, including on soybeans.
For many Pennsylvania farmers, the trifecta of low commodity prices, retaliatory trade tariffs and poor weather conditions dealt a heavy blow.
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According to a report by Lancaster Farming, approximately 1,300 Pennsylvania farmers have received $2.4 million in federal subsidies aimed at compensating for revenue lost in the administration’s trade wars.
All told, approximately $1.78 billion have been disbursed to farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since September.
The $867-billion 2019 farm bill, which Congress approved last week, is expected to provide a safety net to some agricultural sectors. The bill allocates billions of dollars in subsidies to American farmers.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2018/12/tariffs-were-meant-to-help-but-pa-farmers-are-hurting-under-trump-tariffs.html
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