China Slaps 25% Import Tariff on US Biodiesel even though It Doesn’t Import Much
by Meghan Sapp (Biofuels Digest) In China, Bloomberg reports that additional tariffs on US biodiesel imports are among the latest retaliation measures in the ongoing US-China trade war. Even though China imports very little biodiesel from the US, it will still increase the tariff to 25% from the current 10%. China also lobbed a 25% import duty on US-origin soybeans last year, with much of the trade switching to Brazil, but that that was still going to China is now at risk of cancellation due to increased volatility in the trade war that some thought was beginning to ease. READ MORE
Farmers get impatient with Trump’s trade war: ‘This can’t go on’ (CNN)
Factbox: Tariff wars – duties imposed by Trump and U.S. trading partners (Reuters)
‘Grimmer by the day’ — Farmers’ love for Trump in peril (Roll Call; includes VIDEO)
NCGA CEO Talks Trade, Trade Aid, and Ethanol with HAT in DC (Hoosier Ag Today; includes AUDIO)
Excerpt from Roll Call: The love affair between President Donald Trump and rural America has always made sense to me.
When I covered the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump often went to remote farm communities where Democrats, and even other Republican candidates, never bothered.
The image of a New York billionaire holding a rally down the street from an Alabama Dollar General might have seemed hilarious to some reporters, but to the farmers and their families at those rallies, a rich, television celebrity coming to their hometown made them feel important and even hopeful that someone like him would value a place like theirs. The details of his policies weren’t important at those rallies. It was about the way he made them feel.
But that feeling is being tested in ways even American farmers never imagined, despite the fact that Trump, as a candidate, told them exactly what he would do as president when he was elected.
“You know, China?” he asked a rally in Clear Lakes, Iowa, in 2016. “What they’re doing to us in trade is unbelievable. They’re killing us. It’s one of the great thefts in the history of the world.”
Even in a state like Iowa, where farmers rely heavily on Chinese markets to buy their crops, the crowd nodded and cheered as Trump promised to make China play by the same rules as America. “Everybody has great confidence in me, with China, with all these places. And don’t worry about it. We’ll take great care of the situation.”
But since 2016, some of those same farmers have been doing almost nothing but worry. Delivering on his promise to be tough on China, Trump imposed a 25 percent duty on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods in July of 2018, and later, another 10 percent tariff on $200 billion more of Chinese products.
China responded in kind with tariffs on peanuts, cotton, sorghum, pecans and a host of other agricultural products. American commodity prices collapsed as demand fell from the country that many American farmers counted as their single largest buyer.
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“We’ve been understanding during this negotiation process, but we cannot withstand another year in which our most important foreign market continues to slip away and soybean prices are 20 to 25 percent, or even more, below pre-tariff levels,” said John Heisdorffer, a soy grower in Keota, Iowa, who chairs the American Soybean Association. “The sentiment out in farm country is getting grimmer by the day. Our patience is waning, our finances are suffering, and the stress from months of living with the consequences of these tariffs is mounting.”
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You’d think that the pain that farmers have felt since Trump came into office might leave an opening for Democrats to move into in 2020, but they’ll have to do more than Clinton did in 2016, when her rural policy pitch mostly ignored crop prices, but focused on environmental sustainability, broadband access and clean energy.
The president clearly knows that he’s putting farm country in a terrible bind with more tariffs, so he’s got more promises like the ones he made in 2016, including $15 billion in subsidies to somehow replace the Chinese market until a deal is worked out. “[Farmers] will be planting. They’ll be able to sell for less, and they’ll make the same kind of money until such time as it’s all straightened out,” he said from the White House Monday. READ MORE
