Farmers for Free Trade is encouraging the President to avoid repeating history by moving to bring an end to the expanding global trade war.
In a letter to the White House, Americans for Free Trade has encouraged President Trump to use the meeting of the G20, underway today and tomorrow in Buenos Aires, to end the trade war.
Brian Kuehl, the Executive Director of Farmers for Free Trade, says the longer a trade war goes on, the greater the damage.
When you think about a global trade war, the biggest trade war since the Great Depression and it’s worth underscoring that. The Great Depression followed the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and a lot of people would that those tariffs greatly contributed to the Great Depression. So we’re in a global trade war. We have the U.S. placing 232 steel and aluminum tariffs on multiple countries including Canada, Mexico, the EU, China. But then we also have the U.S. in a trade war with China over a number of different intellectual property claims. Then you have uncertainty from things like the renegotiation of NAFTA, now called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
All of those combined are creating a terrible position for businesses, not just in the United States but globally. They’re raising input costs for companies, they’re creating uncertainty about how to manufacture, how to price. They’re hurting farmers tremendously. Farmers who would be exporting soybeans to China, those soybeans are now sitting in grain silos hoping that they’ll be sold in the near future. It’s definitely causing a drag on the global economy and I think that’s one of the big concerns.
~ Brian Kuehl, Farmers for Free Trade
Kuehl recalls back in the 1980’s President Carter imposed an embargo on grain exports to Russia over Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan and, while that embargo was in place, alternative suppliers stepped into that vacuum. He says it was decades and some would say the U.S. has never fully recovered in getting back into those markets.
