The agriculture industry should be prepared for protracted litigation over environmental regulations under the next Trump administration, according to the head of the Agricultural Retailers Association.
Speaking at ARA’s annual conference, President and CEO Daren Coppock predicted there would be "environmental litigation on steroids” over the next four years.
Under the first Trump administration, EPA tried to “rationalize and right-size some of the pesticide regulations that had gone too far, and the NGOs sued over everything. That's going to happen, so we just need to be prepared for it and work with it."
A wild card in the next administration is President-elect Donald Trump's selection for HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Coppock said, expressing surprise that someone he said was a "science denier" had been chosen for the position.
"Even if he's not confirmed, and there's a lot of doubt about whether he would get through a Senate confirmation process, he'll land somewhere in the White House as an adviser or a czar or something that doesn't require confirmation. And so, I think he's one of the persons that we need to just keep our eye on to see where he lands and what kind of initiatives he might be up to."
Coppock also said that ARA and other farm groups need to be active in speaking to administration officials so they understand the impact of tariffs on the agricultural sector.
Daren Coppock“And it's not just exports either,” he said. “It's also imports and inputs. Over 80% of the potash coming into this country comes from Canada. We import a lot of technical ingredients for pesticides, as well, from China.”
Coppock said he understands Trump’s concern that other countries are not dealing fairly with the United States, but pointed to the consequences of the tariff policy imposed during his first administration.
“I know that he's upset with China, upset with others, because he believes that they're taking advantage of us in the ways that they subsidize their businesses,” Coppock said. “And in a lot of cases, he has a point.”
But Coppock, an economist by training, said experience shows “trade makes everybody better” and that “whenever we have imposed a tariff on another country for one of their products coming into our country, it doesn't matter who it is or what sector the economy it's in, the first step” that other countries take is to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural products.
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They do that, he said, because they know the ag community in the U.S. will be hurt significantly and will “scream louder.” However, he added, “the last time we had a tariff trade war, we lost our number-one soybean export market position, not only to China, but in the entire world, and Brazil is now ahead of us in at least soybean exports, and I think they’ve passed us in corn.”
Echoing concerns raised by the National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association late last month, Coppock said, “These reputations for being reliable suppliers take decades to build and they take minutes to destroy.”
Trump recently proposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on China, though he also has mentioned a 60% tariff on imports from China.
However, another speaker at the conference, former Iowa governor and U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, said he believes Trump is bringing back “peace through strength” policies and simply wants trading partners to deal fairly with the U.S. He also touted the phase one and two agreements with China that boosted U.S. ag exports to that country.
After his “fireside chat” with Farm Journal’s Clinton Griffiths, Branstad told Agri-Pulse that even though China did not completely fulfill its promise to buy $80 billion worth of farm products from the U.S., “they purchased a heck of a lot. I understand that they didn't fully, but I can tell you what it did for agriculture commodity prices. It made a huge difference, but I don't know that you're ever going to get perfection on that. I think we need to keep striving to try to protect intellectual property and get a more fair and reciprocal trade.”
Asked whether China can be trusted, Branstad said, “I don't think we can trust them, but I think we need to try to get as much accomplished as possible. You try to get the best deal you can get."
“There are certain things you just can't control,” he said, mentioning the potential for increased trade in the case of a weather-related crop failure in China.
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