“It Is A Full-Blown Crisis Already”: Farmers Cry Out For Help As Massive Financial Losses Pile Up And Demand For U.S. Agricultural Products Disappears
China is normally the largest export market for U.S. agricultural products. In a typical year, we sell tens of billions of dollars worth of agricultural products to the Chinese, but now that door has been slammed shut thanks to the extremely high tariffs that China has imposed on U.S. imports. If that door is not reopened very soon, farmers all over the nation will be facing financial ruin due to massive financial losses that are already piling up. This is not a crisis that may or may not arrive someday. As you will see below, this is a crisis that is already here.
More than 1.4 billion people live in China. We send them massive amounts of soy and pork in a normal year, and that has been a very profitable arrangement for U.S. farmers. Unfortunately, demand has dried up due to the trade war, and this has thrown the U.S. agriculture industry into a state of chaos…
Soy has been severely impacted, with a 125% tariff imposed by China causing a steep decline in exports. Although recent comments from Trump hint at possible tariff reductions, prices for soy derivatives like tofu and animal feed have already climbed. Pork exports have suffered from tariffs reaching up to 72%, leading to higher domestic prices for bacon and pork chops. Dairy products, including cheese and milk, have seen prices spike after China and Mexico introduced new tariffs, affecting popular varieties like cheddar and mozzarella.
Apple exports were curtailed by tariffs from China and India, causing price hikes for varieties such as Gala and Fuji. California’s almond industry has also been hit hard, with China applying a 50% tariff; the additional logistics costs have pushed up prices for products like almond milk. Lobster prices have become increasingly volatile domestically after exports to China fell sharply under tariffs of up to 35%.
There were a few months during the pandemic that got a bit crazy, but if high tariffs persist we are going to witness a meltdown unlike anything we have ever experienced before.
The executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition told CNBC that what we are facing “is a full-blown crisis already”…
Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, or AgTC, a leading export trade group for farmers, told CNBC the number of canceled purchases of U.S. agricultural products should not be described as approaching a crisis. “It is a full-blown crisis already,” he said.
Data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday revealed China made its biggest cancellation of pork orders since 2020, halting a shipment of 12,000 tons of pork.
Even though the tariffs have only been in place for less than a month, the Agriculture Transportation Coalition is reporting that many of its members have already been hit by “massive” financial losses…
AgTC said “massive” financial losses are already being felt by its members as a result of the trade war, based on reports it is receiving from member companies.
It is easy to say that all of the soy, pork and corn that China normally purchases should just be sold to someone else.
But the truth is that “there are no other markets that can quickly replace China’s demand”…
Agricultural exporters warned that there are no other markets that can quickly replace China’s demand and absorb the volume, and that is already affecting prices.
“We have diverted employees and production to other (less profitable) production and dramatically slowed down purchasing from independent venders (loggers, truckers, sawmills),” one lumber exporter reported to AgTC. Some products have already declined 20% in market value, the exporter reported, which it said will influence inventory planning and future investments.
On the flip side, U.S. demand for clothing that is imported from China is plummeting dramatically.
Temu has made a ton of money by selling U.S. consumers fashionable clothes at super cheap prices, but now extremely high tariff rates are forcing Temu to add “import charges” to most orders…
Chinese e-tailer Temu has started adding “import charges” of about 145% in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The fees, which began cropping up over the weekend after price hikes went into effect on Friday, cost more than the individual products consumers are buying and can more than double the price of a typical order.
For example, a summer dress sold on Temu for $18.47 will cost $44.68 after $26.21 in import charges are added to the bill, a 142% surcharge, a CNBC analysis shows. A child’s bathing suit priced at $12.44 will cost shoppers $31.12 when the $18.68 import charge is taken into account, a staggering 150% fee. A handheld vacuum cleaner listed at $16.93 now costs $40.11 when factoring in an import charge of $21.68, which is a roughly 137% markup.
Everything that we buy from China is going to be a lot more expensive from now on, and that is only going to intensify our cost of living crisis.
Inflation has been a major problem for years, and an increasing number of people are turning to debt in order to make ends meet.
Even before the tariffs went into effect, one survey found that the percentage of Americans that have been using “buy now pay later” services has been rapidly growing…
In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.
Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.
Those numbers are extremely alarming.
As a society, we are not ready for a major economic downturn at all.
In fact, almost a quarter of the entire U.S. population is currently dealing with “unmanageable” levels of debt…
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults currently have “unmanageable” debt, as of April 1, according to a survey of 1,000 respondents. Unmanageable debt is defined as when an individual is forced to choose between debt payments and basic necessities.
If you are facing severe financial stress at this moment, I want you to understand that there are millions of others that are just like you.
We are just going to have to batten down the hatches, because the economic storm that we have entered is not going to be easy to endure.
Decades of very foolish decisions have brought our country to this point, and now a day of reckoning has arrived.
So I hope that you have been preparing for this time, because things are only going to get crazier from here.
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About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing. You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
If we are going to enter a time of crisis over this export-import nightmare, so is China. The only problem is that they do not have the where-with-all to withstand months of relocation, whereas we do, even though it will mean a lot of dislocation and hardship for us in the short run. Like Reagan broke the Soviet Union, I think Trump is going to break the CCP and they will have a revolution, with the fall of the CCP. Who is going to blink first? A very dangerous game of chicken to play with Americans that are very spoiled.
It appears we are purposefully, deliberately, intentionally, on a premeditated basis, accelerating (a favorite contemporary term of the present Red-affiliated ruling elitist technocrats & colleagues in their orbit) the consolidation of independent farmers via over-regulation, ecological constraints, the essentially forced use of GMO seeds and therefore toxic chemicals -- which also deplete the soil and cause long-term damage to the land, the crops and those who ingest them or their byproducts, etc. Many farms (in the hundreds per year now) are being sold to foreign investors or big AG; simultaneously, we are purposefully, without seeming regard for the human implications as such, conducting open warfare on the food supply, the support networks for transporting it and the countries or even domestic farms producing it. Is the U.S.'s "turn" (by arrangement) to be the victim of premeditated political maneuvering to assault the population using food scarcity, highly inflated prices and the bypassing of the congressional system governing its implementation with no critical judicial review of the policies and dictates supporting it.
We would certainly not be the first - with historic legends to aspire to like the Holodomor in Stalin's1920's Soviet Union (centered in Ukraine) that exterminated 3 - 7 million, or Hitler's Nazi Hunger Plan in the 1940's that exterminated 4 - 5 million or more including those nations from which food was confiscated, or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in the late 1970's whose forced agrarian experiment exterminated @ 25% of Cambodia's population (@ 2 million) in addition to deaths from disease and executions conducted, or Kim Il-Sung/Jong-Il's North Korean Great Famine in the mid-1990's that prioritized the military's prominence and exterminated 1 - 3 million, in addition to those who died from disease, or Mengistu’s Derg Regime in Ethiopia in the mid 1980's during its civil war, manipulating and leveraging food as a weapon to exterminate up to a million people, or Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF's land wars resulting in massive food scarcity at the beginning of the new millennium, killing thousands, with up to a million systematically starved into submission, or Mao's Great Leap forward in the early 1960's that contributed to the death of @ 15 - 45 million
people. Or more contemporary "heroes" using food as a weapon, like the policies still in place
under Kim Jong-un in North Korea that impacts a 20% representation of the population at any
given time at starvation level subsistence, or Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian starvation production still
affecting those who reside there, now coping with yet another regime change and war, or Sudan’s
ongoing military conflicts that disrupt and reduce available food resources and affect some @ 20
million citizens -- the war on farmers in the EU and now many places abroad under the guise of
"Bird Flu" or other nonsense ginned up by the governing forces in each nation state in order to
seize the level of power behind food scarcity to control, manipulate and weaken (further) the
citizenry to make them more readily accept a "solution" offered by the same government that
brought about the suffering and deprivation for their own objectives.
If enough people simply stood up and declared that they will not be so victimized, would there be a chance at least in this country that someone would hear/care/respond in the affirmative to stave off the seeming inevitable future we are careening into seemingly passively, blindly and without a care or uttered word of concern or protest?