Editor’s note: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue comes from the globalist/multinational school of agriculture which supported failed free trade policies that have injured US agriculture for decades. President Trump signed an executive order directing the US Department of Agriculture to use every bit of legal authority it has to protect farmers and ranchers from China’s retaliation. Rather than complying, Secretary Perdue breaks with the president and joins the tariff critic choir. The fact is that agriculture suffers from global oversupply and excessive concentration in the food processing sector as well as an overvalued dollar. The US needs an agro-industrial policy to fix these problems. Failed free trade policies cause more oversupply, price reductions and farm bankruptcies.
[Hannah Monicken | February 12, 2019 | Inside U.S. Trade]
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said Monday that his department has been telling the White House and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer that the steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico should be lifted.
“With the [U.S.-Mexico-Canada] agreement, unfortunately, the steel and aluminum tariffs remained and that’s something we’re working on now, really, with the president and Ambassador Lighthizer to understand that these — they call them 232 tariffs — [and] retaliatory tariffs need to be removed to have totally tariff free trade just like the USMCA agreement does,” Perdue said at a town hall in North Carolina.
Farmers told Perdue at the event that they were being hurt by the tariffs and losing out on the market in China….
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