Trump Is Annihilating America’s Soybean Farmers and Betraying Them for Argentina

In just nine months, Trump, a man who is imposing debunked 19th century economics by force in a ham-fisted bid to make things in America and export them to the world, has taken our largest export to China from $12.64 billion to LITERALLY FUCKING ZERO. I apologize for the all-caps there, but I could hear my finance degree screeching at me as I wrote that sentence and had to quote it. Zero is something of a foreign concept in finance. There’s always some money in the banana stand after all, and the only kinds of things that go to actual zero are things about to go bankrupt. America isn’t being bankrupted by a man who bankrupted six casinos…is it?

But president deals isn’t stopping there. Not only is he determined to levy taxes on farmers that annihilate their core business with their chief business partner, but he is helping foreign countries who also export a lot of soybeans get a leg up on American farmers to help fill this new gap in China’s demand and leave us behind forever. “Obviously, we would love to be able to fill the demand, but we know that Argentine farmers do too,” said Andrew Larson, director of government relations at the Illinois Soybean Association to Axios. He said this in response to them asking about the Trump administration’s announcement they are readying a $20 billion bailout to Argentina’s government (which ironically enough could help finance climate projects), and Argentina’s government subsequently announcing that they were suspending a 26 percent soybean export tax. If you were trying to bankrupt Illinois soybean farmers, I’m not sure what you would do differently than Trump has done so far this year.

“The frustration is overwhelming,” said American Soybean Association President Caleb Ragland in a statement on Wednesday. “U.S. soybean prices are falling, harvest is underway, and farmers read headlines not about securing a trade agreement with China, but that the U.S. government is extending $20 billion in economic support to Argentina while that country drops its soybean export taxes to sell 20 shiploads of Argentine soybeans to China in just two days.”

“Why would USA help bail out Argentina while they take American soybean producers’ biggest market???” wrote Iowa Republican Senator and famed sloppy poster who will never leave 140-character era Twitter, Chuck Grassley. “We shld [sic] use leverage at every turn to help hurting farm economy[.] Family farmers shld [sic] be top of mind in negotiations by representatives of USA[.]”

Soybeans accounted for 20 percent of America’s cash crop receipts last year, but this year’s figure is far less certain. Between China’s embargo and Soybean Futures prices falling to their lowest level in five years, the economic outlook for America’s farmers is pretty bleak, and that’s before you get to Trump’s gestapo kidnapping their workers off the streets or even right on the farms themselves and harming the labor market enough to facilitate rate cuts, per the Federal Reserve. “What we’re seeing is basically a recession economy in Nebraska and Iowa” said outgoing Republican Congressman Don Bacon last month.

The big problem that America’s soybean farmers have is that our neighbors to the south have reportedly filled their former largest customer’s demand. Nebraska Public Media reports that “China has detached itself entirely from the U.S. market, said Chad Hart, an agriculture economist at Iowa State University.” Brazil and Argentina, who harvest in February, have taken over the lucrative Chinese soybean market this year, while the United States, who harvests in the fall, is left searching for new customers while running out of storage space.

NPM details how since Trump’s initial trade war in 2018 that required a soybean bailout, the industry has invested in domestic crush plants that process soybeans into oil and meal then sell them directly to other countries. “It’s a great band-aid,” Caylor Rosenau, who is a member of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association said to NPM. “But it’s still not fixing the main problem that we still need half of our beans to be exported out of North Dakota.” Given Trump’s bellicose and dim-witted economic policies that aren’t even supported by non-MAGA Republicans, that likely won’t happen soon, and America’s soybean farmers’ rapidly increasing economic desperation will only grow as they figure out how fill the $12.64 billion hole Trump may have blown in their budgets.