Food and agricultural groups mounted an effort Tuesday to get the Trump administration to back down on steel and aluminum tariffs, arguing that they will cause a backlash against their industries by alienating the biggest purchasers of the nation’s food exports.
“The reality is that the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum would result in retaliation from other nations, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs as evidenced by a recent study. Already, the European Union has produced a list of targets for retaliation meaning billions of import taxes on American products, which directly and negatively impact various agricultural commodities,” said Casey Guernsey, spokesman for Americans for Farmers and Families, a coalition group.
The group includes the associations representing the various branches of the food industry from growers such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and numerous state-level agriculture industry groups and farming-related companies like John Deere, to the National Restaurant Association, the National Grocers Association, and Walmart. The effort is a public relations blitz aimed at the administration and Congress.
President Trump last week imposed tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum, arguing the move was necessary for national security. However, administration officials signaled that the tariffs were also meant to force concessions from Canada and Mexico during the renegotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Both countries have been temporarily exempted from the tariffs, but the administration has said they may revoke that.
The president followed that by announcing tariffs on China last week as retaliation for violating U.S. trade law regarding intellectual property.
All three countries are among the top buyers of U.S. agricultural exports. China has responded by announcing retaliatory tariffs targeting $3 billion in U.S. goods, including fruit and pork.
The moves, which have followed more than a year of trade-related threats from the administration, also have prompted the countries to build stronger trade deals with other countries. While the U.S. is the top grain exporter to Mexico for example, it made a tenfold increase in the amount of corn it bought from Brazil in 2017, according to Reuters.
That has alarmed the U.S. food industry, which argues that Trump’s moves will hit his own supporters the hardest. “There are 43 million U.S. jobs that are supported by the food and agricultural industries. And rural voters overwhelmingly voted for President Trump, but that support is not unconditional,” the coalition warned.
