Farmers on Tariffs: Don’t Throw The Baby Out With The Bath Water

While many see the need for global trade re-balancing, farmers fear they may not survive the storm it creates

It’s no secret that global trade inequities have frequently disadvantaged American businesses and workers. When products Americans consume can be produced for far less cost in foreign nations due to exponentially lower wages and regulatory pressures there, something is out of whack.

Farmers know this all too well, as they find themselves competing, often in vain, against food grown in places that require workers be paid a tiny fraction of wages here, with few, if any, of the costly environmental safeguards regulators in the US demand of domestic growers.

Because of this increasing economic pressure, we’re seeing a heartbreaking exodus of farming from Washington. This is due to the wide range of labor-intensive, highly-regulated farm products we grow here, as well as the fact that our state’s government has embraced some of the most stringent and costly agricultural regulations in the world.

This situation has left many of the farms that remain here on the brink of collapse, surviving year-to-year, or even day-to-day, with razor-thin margins and immense uncertainty about their future.

Farmers here are well aware of the need to re-balance global trade to keep farming in Washington. An effort to improve trade equity, in combination with easing harmful and unnecessarily-costly regulations are essential to preserving a future for farming in Washington state.

At the same time, the reality that makes farmers keenly aware of the need to fix trade issues also leaves them uniquely vulnerable to the storm such a re-balancing will create. With the new Trump administration beginning sweeping tariffs in an effort to address trade problems, the inevitable response includes punishing retaliatory tariffs, which at least in the immediate, may cause more pain than relief.

Some types of farming will immediately benefit from tariffs, but retaliatory measures from global trading partners will bring economic devastation to other sectors of agriculture. In the current global agricultural marketplace, the impact each farm feels may vary, as each operation can be positioned differently, with varying levels of exposure to trade chaos.

Of course, the hope is that in the long term, agriculture as a whole benefits from improved global trading conditions and more ability to compete in domestic markets. But in the short term, farming here in Washington state is often not well-positioned to weather the ideally short-term tariff-sparked trade storm. If a farm already teetering on the economic brink loses market share and income to retaliatory tariffs, the long-term benefit is lost on them, because they won’t survive the year.

So when Washington farmers say they fear what new tariffs will mean for their future, it’s often not without an awareness of the need for a global trade shakeup. They’re simply asking the leaders behind the effort not to throw the baby out with the bathwater—don’t kill the very farming they intend to protect in the process.