Navarro tries to calm farmers’ fears in tariffs battle

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday tried to quell rising concerns among U.S. farmers by vowing that the Trump administration will protect them from harm in the global tariffs fight.

U.S. agriculture has expressed increasing frustration about President Trump’s trade policies and is urging him to avoid slapping sweeping tariffs on Chinese exports over fears that Beijing would retaliate against their products.

“We will do everything that we can to help them,” Navarro said on CNBC about farmers. 

{mosads}“It’s unfortunate rather than China simply negotiating these things that they do fairly that they’re basically responding to our legitimate defense with a tax on American farmers,” he said.

China announced that it would raise tariffs on hundreds of products, including soybeans and wine, in response to U.S. plans to punish Beijing for alleged theft of intellectual property and a slew of other trade violations.

Senior administration officials have sought to calm rising fears of a trade war as the tit-for-tat tariff threats roiled world stock markets.

After big drops early in the week, U.S. markets have rallied. The Dow Jones industrial average was up 1,200 points on Thursday since a steep drop on Monday.

Navarro said that U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will engage China in talks about changing their trade practices, which the administration argues has led the U.S. to make its latest batch of tariff actions.

The White House on Wednesday said that the proposed tariffs will likely go into effect if China doesn’t change its trade practices.

China has said it will impose $3 billion in tariffs on U.S. exports in response to Trump’s announced duties of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports.

After the USTR announced the potential new tariffs under Section 301 on Tuesday, Beijing put in motion a plan Wednesday to hit 106 U.S. products with 25 percent tariffs on soybeans, cars and airplanes, totaling about $50 billion.

U.S. officials argue that they have spent months investigating China’s trade practices in reaching the conclusion that tariffs were a necessary next step, while China retaliated against a specific group of U.S. products to seek maximum damage. 

“It’s just simply an effort, I think, to intimidate us, to get us to back down so that they can continue doing all the bad things that we outlined in our report,” a USTR official said.

“The best response would be for them to change their behavior and live up to all the pledges they made in the past,” the official said. 

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who has expressed support for the tariffs, said the president has told him to pass along the message to farmers that the administration is going to take care of them and that “we’re not going to allow them to be the casualties if this trade dispute escalates.”

After China announced its proposed U.S. soybean tariff, the American Soybean Association (ASA) again expressed its “extreme frustration” about the escalation of a trade war with the largest customer of U.S. soybeans.

The group is calling on the White House to reconsider the tariffs that led to China’s retaliation.

“It should surprise no one that China immediately retaliated against our most important exports, including soybeans,” said John Heisdorffer, president of ASA and a farmer in Iowa.

“We have been warning the administration and members of Congress that this would happen since the prospect for tariffs was raised,” Heisdorffer said.

“That unfortunately doesn’t lend any comfort to the hundreds of thousands of soybean farmers who will be affected by these tariffs,” he said.

“This is no longer a hypothetical, and a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans into China will have a devastating effect on every soybean farmer in America.”

China purchases 61 percent of total U.S. soybean exports, and more than 30 percent of overall U.S. soybean production.

On Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that while the United States should defend itself against countries like China that violate global trade rules, farmers shouldn’t pay the price.

“The United States should take action to defend its interests when any foreign nation isn’t playing by the rules or refuses to police itself,” he said.

“But farmers and ranchers shouldn’t be expected to bear the brunt of retaliation for the entire country. It’s not fair, and it doesn’t make economic sense,” he said. 

Casey Guernsey, who leads Americans for Farmers and Families’s “Retaliation Hurts Rural Families” initiative, said in a statement that “we recognize the need to hold China accountable for its unfair trading practices, but that should not be done at the expense of America’s food and agriculture industries, the millions of workers they employ here at home and the millions of families they feed around the world.”

Texas farmer Wesley Spurlock, chairman of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) said “there are no winners in a trade war, only casualties.”

“As trade tensions continue to mount with China, the expanded list of tariffs on food and agriculture exports are making America’s farmers the first casualties,” Spurlock said in a statement. 

In 2018, the U.S. is expected to export $139.5 billion in agricultural goods, according to the NCGA.

“Instead of new protectionist policies, our nation’s focus should be on growing market access and promoting expanded trade from our most competitive industries,” Spurlock said.