By Mac Slavo
We are amidst a food crisis. Farms in the United States Midwest are filing for chapter 12 bankruptcy at an alarming rate. And many are saying president Donald Trump’s trade war is taking the most blame.
We hate to say we told you so, but we told you so. The trade war was a bad idea and everyday average Americans are footing the bill for this asinine policy of tariffs. Now, the food supply could be in jeopardy because of political posturing and that will not bode well for already cash-strapped American families.
A total of 84 farms in the upper Midwest filed for bankruptcy between July 2017 and June 2018, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That’s more than double the number of Chapter 12 filings during the same period in 2013 and 2014 in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, reported Vox.
Farms that produce corn, soybeans, milk, and beef were all suffering due to low global demand and low prices before the trade war, according to economists, but president Trump’s trade war is making the problem even worse by exacerbating the weaknesses in the American economy. China has retaliated against the tariffs by slapping billions of dollars worth of tariffs on United States agriculture exports in response to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. Other countries, including Canada, have also added duties to US agriculture products in response to Trump’s tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum.
The worst part is perhaps the solution the government has proposed to the very real problem they have created. Things have gotten so bad that the Trump administration launched a $12 billion aid package for US farmers coping with retaliatory tariffs that foreign countries have imposed on their products. So the government is paying farmers after stealing more money in the form of tariffs they were paid. There is no such thing as a free market anymore. In September, the government cut $25 million worth of bailout checks to the agriculture industry.
Only the government could create such a problem by stealing money from Americans, then give it back to those same Americans as welfare. Even liberal rags are beginning to understand that taxation is theft thanks to Trump’s tariffs. “We’re just waiting for a turnaround,” one Minnesota banker told the Star Tribune. “We’re waiting for the tariff problem to go away.”
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Dec 01, 2018 @ 04:16:06
Counterpunch
Here’s the Beef: How NAFTA Kissed the West Goodbye
April 15, 2016
In the two years following the enactment of NAFTA, the price of beef dropped by as much as 50 percent. If hamburger eaters exulted at the news, they should have also been aware that with this fall in beef prices has come a crisis for the nation’s small ranchers as grave as that which put 80,000 of them out of business in the early 1980s.
As the small ranches go under, their land is either picked up by agribusiness giants like J.R. Simplot or billionaires playing cowboy like David Packard, or subdivided for the dreary ranchettes that disfigure southern Colorado.
Blame NAFTA. With the signing of the trade agreement came truckloads of Mexican calves, headed for the feedlots and slaughterhouses north of the border. The influx of these Mexican calves produced a meat glut in the United States, driving the prices down to levels disastrous for marginal operations on the arid grasslands of the Interior West.
The value of the ranch–and hence the approval of the bank or insurance company financing his mortgage–depends entirely on his access to publicly owned grass and water. Even if the rancher wants to reduce the number of cattle he’s running to ease the stress on the grasslands, the banks will insist that he continue with the highest stocking rates permitted by the feds, since he will thus be a better risk. This is a primary reason America’s range lands are in such an impoverished ecological condition.
When the feds have tried to reduce the number of cattle on the public range to protect fragile riparian habitat for endangered trout and salmon, the U.S. government has been sued for breach of contract by the banks, notably the Farm Credit Bank of Texas, which holds half a billion dollars in loans that are tied to federal grazing permits.
Watching the impending ruin of many small ranchers with a keen anticipation are the mining companies. As the fortunes of the ranchers decline, those of the gold companies are on the rise.
Ironically, ranchers, under assault from environmentalists for destructive grazing practices, reflexively aligned themselves with some of the more vicious incarnations of the property rights movement, such as the Colorado-based People for the West!, long funded by mining and oil interests.
Some of the big environmental groups are also cheering. Anything that does down a rancher is okay with them. That’s one of the reasons groups like the National Wildlife Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council shilled for NAFTA–they said the agreement would push inefficient industries out of business. Let them wait until the Interior West vanishes under ranchette driveways, toxic cyanide piles from heap-leach gold mining, or ends up in the hands of J.R. Simplot Company.
So the bills for NAFTA are finally coming due. Under its stipulations polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are now being trucked into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico for the first time
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/heres-the-beef-how-nafta-kissed-the-west-goodbye/
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