Trump's trade rhetoric does not match reality for farmers
BY Tory Newmyer
President Trump is over-promising to farmers as his administration looks primed to under-deliver.
The expectations mismanagement sets up a reckoning with a key voting bloc that is already divided on the president's push to rip up trade alliances in search of better terms.
Trump is heralding the trade truce he struck last week with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as a “breakthrough,” telling an Iowa rally last Thursday that he “just opened up Europe for you farmers.”
Not so, European officials say. “On agriculture, I think we’ve been very clear on that — that agriculture is out of the scope of these discussions,” a European Commission representative said Friday, per the Wall Street Journal.
In fact, the world’s two largest economies are engaging on a pair of agricultural issues. But European moves on both fronts predate last week’s summit. The two sides are continuing ongoing negotiations toward lifting European barriers to high-end American beef. And the Europeans are talking up their intent to buy more American soybeans, although they already needed more of the product and likely won’t make up for orders the Chinese have canceled as part of their trade fight with the Trump administration.
More from the Journal:
“Agriculture is one of the most sensitive and difficult trade questions for Europe, especially for France, and the U.S. and Europe have fought for years over everything from European tariffs to U.S. use of hormones and genetically modified products. They say that when Trump aides tried to broaden the talks from industrial products to agriculture, they threatened to demand the U.S. drop its 'Buy American' provisions for government procurement, a non-starter for the Trump administration.
The U.S. side 'heavily insisted to insert the whole field of agricultural products,' Mr. Juncker told reporters right after the meeting. 'We refused that because I don’t have a mandate and that’s a very sensitive issue in Europe.'”
more at Washington post
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