'Large number of farmers won’t survive this': Trump's new trade moves put growers at risk

The game of chicken Donald Trump is playing with China as part of his tariff war is reportedly on the verge of doing irreparable harm to America’s soybean farmers with Chinese negotiators holding the upper hand.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, soybeans farmers are poised to harvest “tens of millions of tons of soybeans,” but their biggest market, China, is not buying, thereby putting pressure of the Trump administration to make a tariff deal.

As the Journal’s Jon Emont and Patrick Thomas are reporting, China’s buyers are boycotting American soybean crops unless Trump first drops the 20 percent tariff the the president imposed.

Trump’s reluctance to bend now has U.S. farmers on edge, fearing this could be the end for them.

“It is U.S. farmers who are feeling the pain. Nearly a quarter of the more than 4 billion bushels of soybeans American farmers grow each year are exported to China, which is by far the world’s biggest soy importer. The country imported nearly $13 billion of soybeans from the U.S. last year, compared with about $2 billion two decades ago,” the report notes before adding that Caleb Ragland, a Kentucky soybean farmer, lamented, “We have a large number of farmers that won’t survive this.”

At a U.S. soy industry conference in August, Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng laid the blame of the Trump administration and stood up for the U.S. farmers by noting, “After confusion and chaos in the plowing season, our farmer friends may soon have to face new uncertainty in the harvest season.”

According to the Journal, China anticipated the fight with the American president and created stockpiles to lessen the blow in their own country, with China turning to other trade partners, including Argentina and Uruguay, to make up for their own shortfalls.

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