Trump sees crop insurance as 'national security issue,' adviser says
WASHINGTON, Sept. 14, 2016 - Donald
Trump’s top agriculture policy adviser says the GOP presidential candidate
views crop insurance and commodity programs as matters of national security and
is open to easing rules on the agricultural guest worker program.
Sam Clovis said Trump has “made it very clear that agriculture is a
national security issue and should be treated as such. So that may give
you an indication of where we’re going to be looking at the farm economy,”
Clovis told Agri-Pulse after speaking
to an agribusiness luncheon in Washington on Tuesday along with Charles W.
Herbster, the chairman of the campaign’s agricultural advisory committee.
Asked specifically if Trump would be
open to renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clovis responded, “If it
was in our (national) interest.” Trump has said he wouldn’t do multilateral
trade agreements, only bilateral deals. But Clovis said Trump’s comments on
trade policy were being taken too literally.
“All of us have preferences. That
doesn’t mean that’s going to be the dictate,” Clovis said. “One of the problems is that a lot of people
in the media take him very literally as opposed to listening to the sum of what
he says and putting all that together and coming to a conclusion to some
synthesis of what he said.” Here are other highlights from their interviews
with Agri-Pulse.
--On the farm bill: As president,
Trump might oppose the GOP platform’s proposal for splitting the next farm
bill, according to Clovis. (Congress is expected to begin writing the
legislation as soon as next year.) Clovis said that dividing nutrition from the
rest of the farm bill would make a farm bill more difficult to pass. “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t split it,” he said.
Clovis said a Trump White House would
consult with representatives of both parties in developing its approach to the
farm bill. “One of the things we want to
do is make sure that there is input from both sides of the aisle on this
because it affects everybody,” he said.
Citing slumping commodity prices and
equipment sales, Clovis disagreed with critics of farm policy who say farmers
are generally well off and don’t need government support. “I would say the farm economy is shaky right
now. It’s shaky for a lot of reasons. … I really think we have some
serious issues.” He
said that crop insurance “would be an important part of any farm bill we would
approach.”
--On immigration: Clovis didn’t
disagree when told that Trump’s recent statements on immigration seemed to
parallel President Obama’s as far as enforcement priorities were concerned:
Emphasize border security and focus deportations on illegal immigrants with a
criminal record.
“It ought to be the policy of the United States government to enforce the
law and get rid of those people who are the greatest threat to this country and
get rid of those people first,” Clovis said.
Clovis said a Trump administration
would consult agribusiness leaders as its immigration policy was developed. “We
very much want to make sure that people understand that there will probably be
an opportunity for them to have input and that we’ll
figure out ways to make sure we’re not going to close down all of our
agriculture in this country,” he said.
Clovis also said a Trump
administration would review the H-2A guest worker program to ensure the rules
“make sense.” He cited approvingly the Bracero guest worker program, which
ended in 1964. Clovis said it “worked
extremely well,” while the H-2A program, by contrast, is “not ideal.”
-On TPP: Clovis’ remarks on the TPP
suggest that a President Trump might not view the trade agreement that much
differently than Hillary Clinton, who has directly called for renegotiating
changes in the 12-nation pact. She has compared her approach to the one that
President Obama took with the Korean trade agreement, which was originally
negotiated during the George W. Bush administration and then tweaked under
Obama before it was approved by Congress in 2011.
Clovis said that a Trump
administration would first want to examine the TPP text in detail and address
issues such as currency manipulation and the impact of the agreement on U.S.
regulations.
“We may have committees that may be
overriding or at least pushing back on our own laws. We want to make sure that
if we have intellectual property protections in this country that all the other
countries have the same. If we have labor and environmental issues in this
country, we want the other countries to have the same. If they’re not on the
same plane, we want to find out when they are going to get to that plane,” he
said.
Clovis rejected the idea that Trump’s
criticism of the TPP has increased opposition to the treaty. “If one guy… poisoned the political support
for it, what does that tell you about the agreement?”
#30
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