Thread on soybeans, the trade war, and the US ag system. Trump has articulated no coherent economic rationale for his trade aggression toward China, so it's prob the case of a nativist demagogue conjuring a yellow menace to whip up his angry-white base before a big election. 1/
Many pixels have been spilled, by me included, on the contradiction that the main casualties of Trump's trade jihad have been people generally within his base: large-scale commodity farmers. 2/
The question often asked: will the loss of markets for for soybeans etc. hurt the GOP on the midterm election? The latest, from @BCAppelbaum is consistent with what I and others have found: prob not much. Farmers are anxious but sticking w Trump. 3/ nytimes.com/2018/11/05/bus…
It's a legit conundrum. Trump attacks farmers' labor pool with his immigrant policies, and closes much needed foreign markets for their good thru trade wars, yet they stick with him. I'll venture a theory as to why downthread. 4/
What's lost in these election-focused analyses is these farmers have been hurting for a while. Here's soybean prices. Plunged in '14, never recovered. That last leg down is after Trump started rattling his trade saber. 5/ 
Now look at soybean acres. You'd think that when prices plunged in '14, farmers would respond by devoting fewer acres ts soybeans. Instead, the opposite happened. Why? 6/
The reason is that big-time US commodity farming is a corn-soybean duopoly. Corn prices dropped even more steeply than soybeans in '14 and also have never recovered... 7/
...and when that happened, farmers cut corn plantings and shifted acres to soy—which of course only made soy prices fall. Again, all of this was in play before The Donald launched his trade machinations. 8/
Right now, China has stopped buying US soybeans and literal mountains of unsold soybeans are piling up in the Midwest, vulnerable to spoilage. What is farmers' response? New year, they plan to trim soybean acres and plant more corn. 9/ profarmer.com/markets/news/u…
Already, corn futures are falling in response to news of more acreage/supply next year. In other words, these farmers are on a corn-soy treadmill. Price of one plunges so they plant more of the other; then it plunges, too. Repeat. 10/ farmlead.com/blog/breakfast…
What could solve this conundrum? a) Supply management. 11/ motherjones.com/food/2018/05/f…
b) Use US ag policy, ie, farm bill, to push for crop diversification, ie adding more crops to the rotation besides corn/beans. Not only would this help end the economic death spiral, it would largely solve some massive ecological problems w corn/soy 12/ journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
c) Antitrust. Mega-buyers like ADM, Cargill. Tyson, Smithfield love the corn-soy death spiral bc it ensures them cheap commodities/feed. Pesticide giants like Monsanto-Bayer/DowDupont love it bc monocrops mean lots of weed/pests to kill. 13/
They dominate these markets and wield massive power over growers and also (though lobbying/campaign finance) gov't policy. Break 'em up! 14/
Neither Dems nor GOP strongly advocate any of these polices. The Dems have gotten more vocal about antitrust, but Obama didn't do nearly enough when in power. On farm policy, the parties are near identical; they fight over hunger policy (on which the GOP are monsters) 15/
Where they're different: Dems r more vocal about enviro regs, & that spooks farmers (tbh, they're pretty weak on that, too). The GOP, by contrast, is virulently anti-reg, & that's why (I think) farmers cling to them. They get bamboozled by stuff like: motherjones.com/environment/20… 16/
My idea: Dems run on progressive rural populism: fair prices (supply management), shift farm policy to support diversification (non-punitive enviro benefits, uses current policy mechanisms), and antitrust. Is that how to pry farm country GOP control? Worth a try.
I think folks assumed when Trump attacked farmers labor supply and destroyed their foreign markets, they'd defect to the Dems. Didn't work. Perhaps a more active approach is the way forward. '
