The war in Ukraine is costing American farmers. Despite his campaign promises, Trump can't stop it
Cash-strapped American farmers must be getting frustrated with the failure of President Trump to follow up on one of the emptier promises he made during the presidential campaign last year.
He repeatedly boasted that he would quickly end the long, bloody and costly war between Russia and Ukraine, often claiming that he could settle the war in one day. Once he even claimed that “I will get it settled before I even become president,” meaning if he won the election he’d get the job done as president-elect.
That turned out to be campaign hooey, of course, as Trump, around 250 days into his term, seems no closer to settling the war than he ever was. Just yesterday Trump cancelled a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, calling it a waste of time.
Meanwhile, the ongoing war in Ukraine has caused fertilizer prices to rise sharply, squeezing farmer profit margins into non-existence. Rising input costs are causing the frustration among American farmers to mount, as they watch prices for their crops stagnate at low levels thanks to Trump’s trade policies.
Last week the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation sent a letter to President Trump, telling Trump that “America’s farmers and ranchers are facing extreme economic pressures that threaten the long-term viability of the U.S. agriculture sector.” The letter specifically named high fertilizer prices as one of the cost pressures “that have strained farm finances.” Potash, an extremely important crop nutrient, is produced in major quantities in Russia. Indeed, the AFBF cites the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a “defining backdrop for the fertilizer trade.”
Ending this conflict would go a long way toward taking some of the financial pressures off American farmers, but it looks like Trump’s campaign promise to end it isn’t going to be fulfilled anytime soon.
By way of financial mitigation, farmers may be getting a multi-billion dollar cash bailout from the Trump administration, which is a tacit admission that the president has failed to live up to the promise he made during his State of the Union address last March.
On that occasion Trump said “Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer—I love the farmer—who will now be selling into our home market, the U.S.A., because nobody is going to be able to compete with you.”
Right. The reality is that despite Trump’s ingratiating rhetoric, his policies have been devastating for the farmers he claims to love.
With respect to the payout, I most certainly hope the money does some good and couldn’t be more supportive of giving our farmers some monetary relief. I can’t think of a more important element of national security than a financially solvent ag sector.
Meanwhile, I wish Trump, whose wrong-headed tariff policies have made a mess out of our global trading apparatus, would go back to the traditional GOP approach to trade, trying to make it as free and fluid as possible. A return to that approach is a pipe-dream under this administration, but I do remember — with some nostalgia — when free market-based imperatives were the bread and butter of Republican trade policy.
Others remember it too. That long-standing source of conservative economic thought, the Cato Institute, notes that Trump’s trade policies made soybean farmers one of their biggest victims during his first term and that his “erratic and belligerent” trade actions are likely to initiate a replay.
Re-quoting the American Farm Bureau, those actions “threaten the long-term viability of the U.S. agriculture sector.”
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: South Dakota cropland, public domain, wikimedia commons
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