On Jan. 7, the day after Congress certified Donald J. Trump’s election as the next president of the United States, the U.S. “Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield, (California) … descending on businesses where day labourers and field workers gather.”
The impact of the raids was immediate.
“We’re in the middle of our citrus harvesting. This sent shockwaves through the entire community,” Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, told the non-profit, non-partisan news website CalMatters.
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If this is the “the new normal, this is absolute economic devastation,” said Richard S. Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at Cal State-Bakersfield.
If these raids are the new normal, the resulting “panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labour, foreshadow what awaits communities across California” — and the entire agricultural sector nationwide — “if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.”
Rural America has a slew of problems in need of attention by Congress and the incoming administration. Creating new, widespread and unsolvable ones such as massive labour shortages in the citrus, vegetable, meat-packing and dairy sectors is a reckless, agricultural recession-inducing act.
Still, don’t expect either branch of the federal government to focus on these immediate needs because most, such as the still undone farm bill, require co-ordinated, sustained efforts by now-in-charge Republicans. Almost all of that majority muscle is already ticketed for the White House’s two biggest wants, tax cuts and immigration reform.
Besides, congressional Republicans are already creating more problems for any farm bill to pass either chamber in 2025. The reason is the ageless Republican effort to slice food assistance programs such as the Supplement Food Assistance Program (SNAP). The now-dead 2024 bill included deep cuts.
In fact, those House of Representatives-proposed cuts were the key reason last year’s bill, after clearing the chamber’s agriculture committee, was never presented to the entire House for a vote: it would not have passed because House Republican conservatives thought the cuts too small and House Democrats thought them too big.
That joint left-right opposition guaranteed the 2024 committee bill could not pass the House, and that failure would have handed the majority Republicans another embarrassing legislative failure.
However, rather than admit that SNAP is an almost bulletproof farm bill element, Republican House agriculture committee members blamed Senate Democrats for not passing the 2024 bill when, in fact, the Republican Party itself couldn’t even get it out of the House.
However, here they come again.
“House Republicans are passing around a list of potential cuts they could use to offset president-elect Donald Trump’s top priorities,” reported Politico Jan. 13, before his inauguration on Jan. 20.
“One option on the table? Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”
Insisting on these cuts when both right-wing Republicans and almost all Democrats are loath to vote for them just creates more needless delays for all Americans, rural and urban alike. Besides, no American voted for more hungry fellow citizens last November.
However, creating political issues where none exist is something of a parlour game for the new administration, especially when it comes to the two largest agriculture trading partners and continental neighbours, Canada and Mexico. Each is a US$29 billion a year agriculture export market for the United States and each has been singled out during the presidential transition as likely tariff targets.
Also singled out is America’s third largest agriculture export market last year, China, that imported nearly $28 billion worth of American farm production.
Together, the three nations bought almost 40 per cent of all U.S. agricultural exports last year. Any politically induced stumble in any of those markets will carry deep and costly consequences across rural America.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural commentator from Illinois.
