Thread by @kannbwx

Tweets from Trump just now:

"With the over 100 Billion Dollars in Tariffs that we take in, we will buy agricultural products from our Great Farmers, in larger amounts than China ever did, and ship it to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance."

And next in the chain:

"Our Farmers will do better, faster, and starving nations can now be helped."

Not sure which agricultural products he's talking about, but we have an oversupply of soybeans and we're heading there on corn. Poor & starving nations don't have robust livestock industries so I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. People don't eat corn/soybeans.

The govt buying product from farmers... sounds a lot like... China. Price support/govt purchasing has artificially inflated prices in China relative to the rest of the world. There's no genuine price discovery. It didn't exactly work either, so China has been phasing that out.

And another:

By the way, here's the annual value of U.S. exports to #China for JUST bulk ag commodities:

(from U.S. Census Bureau)

2014: $17.6B
2015: $14B
2016: $16.4B
2017: $14.8B
2018: $5B

And then I would suggest this table:

Looks like people are confused on the above statement. People do NOT eat corn for grain or raw soybeans. Not the ones commercially grown in the USA. Its mostly for animals. Making food out of this requires PROCESSING, something poor/starving countries don't have.

We have to find some way to reduce these large stocks of U.S. #soybeans that #China is not buying. You can't just ship these raw soybeans shown in the chart to a 3rd world country and just expect them to "eat" them. That is not how this works.