One of the oldest sayings in poker warns that if you’re in a game for 20 minutes and haven’t figured out who’s the patsy — the player most likely to be the game’s biggest loser —you’re the patsy.
In American agriculture, you can make a strong case that this year’s biggest patsy is the soybean sector.
In a marketing year when U.S. corn exports totalled a record 2.83 billion bushels, tariff-hammered soybean sales to China were down 51 per cent and global U.S. soy sales were down 23 per cent.
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And that was before U.S. president Donald Trump’s Oct. 10 threat to again hit China — and American soybean growers —with 100 per cent import tariffs on Nov. 1.
Alarmingly, that wasn’t the worst card dealt U.S. farmers that week.
For example, as promised last month, U.S. treasury secretary Scott Bessent gave a generous gift to another key U.S. soy competitor, Argentina.
The U.S. Treasury “directly purchased Argentine pesos” under “a $20 billion currency swap ‘framework’ … to help ease the South American country’s financial turmoil,” reported Politico.
“Swap” sounds so benign when in fact Bessent’s move is a risky gamble. The U.S. is propping up the sinking Argentine peso for the singular reason to boost the re-election bid of president Javier Milei. If the peso continues its slide, however, the deal “could expose the U.S. to losses” on Bessent’s — and U.S. taxpayers’ — $20 billion bet.
That won’t happen, Bessent later forecast on social media, because “the U.S. Treasury is prepared, immediately, to take whatever exceptional measures are warranted to provide stability to markets.”
The U.S. Treasury may be “prepared” to take “exceptional measures,” but are U.S. taxpayers? And what about U.S. soybean growers? More peso propping-up means more U.S. soybean sales going down.
However, Bessent isn’t freelancing. The White House acknowledged its overt electioneering for Milie by endorsing his candidacy in a Washington visit Oct. 14.
In the meantime, the U.S. government entered its third week of limited operations with warring sides — at first Senate Republicans and Democrats, later the White House — ratcheting up the stakes daily. Agency after agency closed, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many of its county Farm Service Agency offices.
The closings made almost everyone in rural America — taxpayers, farmers, ranchers, local health-care institutions, lenders, input suppliers, landlords, ag workers — a loser.
The shutdown also ended attempts by the White House to carry through on its modest-but-certain-to-grow promise to assist farmers squeezed by rising input costs and weakened, tariff-worried commodity markets.
However, Trump’s offered $13 to $15 billion in federal aid, critics quickly pointed out, barely covers the estimated $14 billion in higher input costs U.S. farmers and ranchers had to ante up just to stay in the game this year. (The president’s first-term trade war with China cost taxpayers an estimated $28 billion of extraordinary farm aid.)
And that’s not the only unknown. Also hanging fire is the legality of the White House’s claim it can move both accumulated tariff money and an unspent $13 billion in Commodity Credit Corp. cash to a bailout fund in “the Office of Secretary (of Agriculture),” reported Agri-Pulse Oct. 8.
The shutdown also means no updates on vital ag market information such as U.S. production and exports. That lack of unbiased data, noted Reuters Oct. 14, yields market power to “grain firms such as Cargill, Bunge Global and Archer-Daniels-Midland.”
Add it all up — more tariffs, an unlimited peso bailout, a government shutdown, no plan or path to send federal assistance — and farmers are holding a bad hand in a rigged game where the rules change every day.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural commentator from Illinois.
