The Trump administration’s tariff scheme appears less and less likely to bring manufacturing jobs back to U.S. shores.
Businesses across the country are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trump’s insistence, they can’t balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
“Some manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported Friday.
That’s because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipment—which Trump’s tariffs have made unaffordable—from abroad.
Another example would be Trump saying that US farmers now have unprecedented access to the UK market for sales but the US uses growth hormone which is banned in the UK and Europe. It’s very unlikely they’re going to designate a non growth hormone section of their farm just to ship beef overseas.
Which would only be financially sound if for some reason there is significant demand for American beef in the UK which… Why would there be?
The beef issue is actually older and a bit more complicated than the hormone question. When the hormone ban went into effect, the only product banned that wasn’t before was edible organ meats.
North America is an agricultural powerhouse and the US in particular. A lot of countries have deep and legitimate concerns about US agricultural exports purely based on the low cost and high volumes, which can threaten domestic food production: An unacceptable condition based purely on national security concerns. It’s part of why the US exacerbates the situation by subsidizing agriculture. We may produce a stupid quantity of food, but it must always be, on the whole, economically viable to produce food domestically.
While the concerns of the EU citizens are real, the readiness with which they were acted upon is in part due to the convenience of protecting the agricultural sector of more powerful European countries.
While correcting artificially low prices is actually a valid use of tariffs, using them for protectionist purposes like offsetting actual competitive advantages creates a lot of trade agreement drama.
Can’t retaliate against food safety restrictions. Hence the wto court cases that have been flying around for decades.
The reason there would be a demand for US beef is the same reason as Japan has such a high demand for US beef: it’s cheap and available. Even the high quality import is often price competitive with average or low quality domestic.
Also, there’s already a fair number of US producers of beef that didn’t get hormone treatment. Nothing mandates they get it, and we even already have inspection programs to facilitate it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/imports-exports/nhtc
If course, that’s all the center of the current wave of wto disputes, since the EU restricts beef imports to a quota, and no one can agree on certification requirements.
soybean, pork was heavily exported to asia, now with the tariffs, asia will find other countries to do it for them. brazil is willing to destroy the amazon for cattle farming. and Alfalfa which is mostly for the ME market. in the usa, outside of limited consumption of health food store, and research universities involving botany.