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Trump’s trade gambles heighten stakes for U.S. agriculture

A policy professor at the University of Illinois calls the Trump Administration’s handling of trade a huge gamble and says U.S. agriculture has a lot at stake.

Jonathan Coppess tells Brownfield while the President looks for better deals with partners like Canada, Mexico, and China, the overall impact of trade with those countries was already positive the last 15 to 20 years.

“You can get lost in the data and miss that there’s a bigger and potentially more disturbing story line to all this, which is countries like Canada and Mexico, who are allies and important trading partners, the way we are treating them is not the way any of us in any business would ever treat their customers.”

He says the long-term implications of negotiating this way could be far more devastating than the short-term commodity price fluctuation.

“Because we are isolating our country in a trade environment, and putting our allies in a position of having to respond to us in a way that we frankly have not dealt with.”

Coppess contends current trade deficits with Mexico, Canada, and China are minor relative to the total value those markets provide U.S. agriculture, and the risk of destroying those relationships could prove more costly than the reward of striking new deals.