Farm & Food File: Rural America has enough problems; why create new ones?

The day after Congress certified Donald 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 laborers 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,” said Casey Creamer, president of the industry group California Citrus Mutual, reported the nonprofit, nonpartisan news website, CalMatters.

If this is “the new normal, this is absolute economic devastation,” said Richard Gearhart, an associate professor of economics at California State University, Bakersfield.

If these raids are the new normal, the resulting “panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California” — and the entire ag 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 like massive labor shortages in the citrus, vegetable, meatpacking and dairy sectors is a reckless, ag recession-inducing act.

Still, don’t expect either branch of the federal government to focus on these immediate needs because most — like the still undone farm bill — require coordinated, 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 GOP effort to slice food assistance programs like SNAP, the Supplement Food Assistance Program. The now-dead 2024 bill included deep cuts.

In fact, those House-proposed cuts were the key reason last year’s bill, after clearing the chamber’s Ag Committee, was never presented to the entire House for a vote: it would not have passed because House GOP conservatives thought the cuts too small and House Dems 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 GOP another embarrassing legislative failure.

But rather than admit that SNAP is an almost bulletproof farm bill element, GOP House ag members blamed Senate Dems for not passing the 2024 bill when, in fact, the GOP itself couldn’t even get it out of the House.

But 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. “One option on the table? Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”

Insisting on these cuts when both right-wing Repubs and almost all Dems 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.

But creating political issues where none exist is something of a parlor game for the incoming administration, especially when it comes to the two largest ag trading partners and continental neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Each is a $29-billion-a-year U.S. ag export market and each has been singled out during the presidential transition as likely tariff targets.

Also singled out is America’s third largest ag export market last year, China, that imported nearly $28 billion worth of American farm production.

Together, the three nations bought almost 40% of all U.S. ag exports last year. Any politically-induced stumble in any of those markets will carry deep and costly consequences across rural America.