One of President Donald Trump’s trade war objectives is to help middle America from the evil Chinese.
Unfortunately, farmers have been decimated by the trade dispute with the world’s second-largest economy, losing billions of dollars. The Trump administration has tried to alleviate the damage with financial assistance, but it’s a slap in the face to American farmers.
But how bad is the U.S. agriculture sector? Well, let’s take a look at soybeans, one of the biggest agricultural exports to China.
According to The New York Times, U.S. soybean sales to China collapsed by 94 percent from the 2017 harvest. Bloomberg also reported that Chinese demand for American soybean plunged 80 percent in September.
Bill Gordon, a Minnesota-based soybean farmer, summed up the situation perfectly:
“We lost that foreign market, so a lot of the elevators still had soybeans in them that would have been shipped out. Without that market, our silos are filling up with soybeans. But storage became a major issue in the country. Our yields were lower, so it helped the elevators with storage that we didn’t have a normal crop.”
Without a U.S.-China trade agreement in sight, it’s only going to worsen.
As one baseball fan famously told Buck Showalter of the Baltimore Orioles: Whaddya gonna do now Trump?
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