The Trump administration’s tariffs, a 25 percent duty on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, are set to take effect 12:01 a.m. EST on Friday. Beijing has said it would retaliate immediately with tariffs of its own.
That leaves U.S. farmers in the crossfire.
“Rural communities are dependent on agriculture. It’s their life blood,” Casey Guernsey, a seventh-generation beef farmer in the Missouri-Kansas-Iowa area, told CNBC.
Chinese tariffs would raise the price of agricultural products and end up costing farmers in the state of Missouri alone around $138 million in one year, said Guernsey, owner of CL Guernsey, a family farm.
One in four pigs raised in the U.S. is sold overseas, and the Chinese are the world’s top consumers of pork.
“We can’t afford any increase in price,” Guernsey said on “Closing Bell” Thursday. “The difference between making money and losing money per head sometimes is just a couple of dollars. And whenever you’re looking at duties like this, it could make or break the operation.”
In fact, the tariffs might only make the situation worse for some farmers. The agricultural economy has been in a down slump for more than a decade. Profits from U.S. farms reached a 12-year-low in 2018, according to the Department of Agriculture.
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