Utah Pig Farmers are in for a Hard Winter.
There are things about the New National Security tariffs that just don't make sense, but the risk to pork farmers isn't one of them.
Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at A.E.I., or the American Enterprise Institute, said "it takes work to get the trade deficit under control..." "and that isn't inconsistent with the President's promises to shrink our trade deficit with China." source ... in an article written for KSL news meant to foreshadow the hard times Utah is in for, pork prices were one of the issues that made a lot of sense.
In 2008, Pork made up $34.5 billion to the country’s GNP, or gross national product. (Source) As of the end of March, 2018, when the White House firsts announced the new tariffs, the pork that Utah farmers shipped to China made up roughly $20,000,000 of America's GNP: and now China plans to retaliate, says Derrick Scissors.
Utah's pigs have fallen in the crosshairs. Though pork is not the only industry that Scissors said was threatened, it was the only one that made sense. A 20 million $ cut, could be catastrophic for pig farmers.
According to Jon Huntsman, Utah is also a huge supplier of aluminum. "We have a multimillion-dollar aluminum recycling industry... China is the number one consumer of that aluminum..." ... ... Let that marinate for a second... ... ...
Further more, KSL and its affiliate, The Deseret News, both claimed that Utah was in the middle of a building bubble. But now, with the increased price of aluminum imported to Utah from China, building is sure to slow... this is the part that didn't make sense to me... because it was in those two same articles that KSL said "that retaliatory tariffs on the aluminum that Utah exports to China, will cause hardship for Utah's aluminum recyclers.
Why can't Utah buy it's own crap?
Feel free to clue me in if I'm missing something in the comments below... But, Maybe I'm just not seeing why Utah can't start buying it's own aluminum...why weren't we buying locally already?
We've been watching Wisconsin Dairy Farmers decimated because of trade inbalances established long before the Trump administration took office. Nobody said that this national debt problem was going to be an easy thing to tackle.
Pigs are a commodity. It is legitimate concern that the price of pork will be grounded if China stops buying it this fall. It's really too bad that the pig farmers are going to be eating the meat of the problem if China does retaliate.
There's a chance China won't retaliate. Talk is cheap and so has been the pork from America.
They have a hungry Nation who live within their means. Pork is a staple food in the Chinese diet, and according to (Source) Chinese food isn't only about nutrition. By messing with what the Chinese people can buy, their government will be messesing with their people's culture and tradition.
I highly doubt anyone in the Trump administration had thought about China's nearly spiritual relationship with their food when they sought to fortify the availability of US-made metals earlier this year; nevertheless, there's a good chance that China won't do anything to cause pork prices to go up back East. But we will see for sure, before September 2018.
It might be a bluff, but with most commodities a bluff is all it takes to destabilise a market. And pork is a commodity like it or not. If China initiates a support Duty on Utah pork products, Utah's Pig farmers are in for a hard winter.
Also see...
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/06/14/utahs-economy-is-threatened-by-retaliatory-tariffs-sought-by-canada-mexico-and-the-eu-trade-official-warns/
https://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=46293103
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/trump-aluminum-steel-tariffs.html