Free Trade Is Good for American Farmers Like Me
By Terry Wanzek: Jamestown, North Dakota USA
As I drove my combine across my fields in North Dakota this past fall, I didn’t think much about Iowa’s Republican presidential caucus, scheduled for Monday, January 15.
Sometimes I just looked up at the blue sky and saw the white contrail of a jet. The sight always reminds me that I literally live in “flyover country.”
I grow soybeans and corn. The U.S. leads the world in producing the latter and is a close second to Brazil in the former. More than half the nation’s soybeans and about 15% of its corn is destined for international markets, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I also grow pinto beans, which are sold to buyers in Mexico.
Yet almost nobody in Washington or on the presidential campaign trail is talking about the importance of free trade. For farmers like me, not much in politics matters more.
In 2022, all U.S. agricultural exports were worth $196 billion. More than half of this value came from soybeans, corn, beef, dairy products, cotton, and tree nuts such as almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. The top 10 markets for our products reveal the amazing diversity of our customers: China, Mexico, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Colombia, and Vietnam.
These exports were made possible by old-fashioned hard work plus seed genetics, crop-protection tools and innovative machinery. We also relied on trade agreements—and with new ones, we could do even better.
Yet Joe Biden is poised to become the first president during the era of the World Trade Organization, started in 1995, not to negotiate a new trade agreement. This isn’t simply a function of the protectionism favored by many of his party’s traditional constituents. Biden’s immediate Democratic predecessors have a much better record. President Clinton secured the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. President Obama finished pacts with Panama and South Korea.
Obama also supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which aimed to strengthen ties among the nations of the Pacific Rim, including the U.S. TPP was mostly about economics, but it involved a national-security dimension, seeking to unite the region against Chinese influence. Unfortunately, President Trump pulled out of TPP, surrendering an opportunity to build export markets for American farmers and manufacturers.
In 2020 Biden suggested he might revive the trade agreement. “TPP wasn’t perfect but the idea behind it was a good one,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. “That’s what happened when we backed out of TPP—we put China in the driver’s seat.”
Yet as president, Biden has done next to nothing to move this idea forward. This ought to make him vulnerable to criticisms by Republican presidential candidates trying to attract the votes of farmers, both in the GOP caucuses and primaries as well as in the general election.
Trump can’t be the one to advance such critiques. On his first day in office, he withdrew from the talks surrounding TPP. Although he negotiated the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement, which updated NAFTA, his trade legacy mostly has involved a mix of strong language and disputes that have limited trade.
If he’s elected again, he has promised to enact an even more aggressive plan. This past August he called for a “privilege” tax that would slap a 10% tariff on all foreign-made products that enter the U.S. He styles this as “economic nationalism” that puts America first.
Actually, this approach puts American farmers last. We need economic internationalism. Other nations would retaliate immediately with their own taxes. Among their targets of retribution would be farm products, making me one of the first casualties of a new trade war.
This should create a political opportunity for the other Republican presidential candidates. Not only can they point out Biden’s failure to expand trade for Americans whose livelihoods depend on it, but they also can question their own party’s front-runner for threatening to make a bad problem even worse.
Yet the subject of farmers and their economic interests barely has come up so far during this presidential contest, even as candidates have canvassed Iowa before its first-in-the-nation Republican caucus. This goes beyond trade policy: We’re also interested in what the candidates have to say about regulations, infrastructure, and the development of new technologies, such as gene editing. So far, nothing.
We are living in an age of political disruption. Candidates who break the silence on trade and offer a positive agenda for expanding exports may find themselves rewarded with farm-country votes. That’s the kind of harvest even a politician can understand.
Terry Wanzek grows wheat, corn, soybean, and pinto beans on a family farm in North Dakota. He serves as a ND State Senator and is a member of the Global Farmer Network www.globalfarmernetwork.org
A version of this column was previously published in the Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2023
