President Trump and his Democratic challengers are ignoring "the critical issue facing the agricultural sector: low farm income brought on by five years of falling crop prices," Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray of the University of Tennessee write for The Daily Yonder.
And what should the politicians do? "From the perspective of social stability and humanitarian concerns, the objective should be to cultivate and maintain an agricultural sector in which productive capacity always exceeds current demand. To do otherwise would be ethically unacceptable." And what are political leaders doing to accomplish that? "From our perspective: not much."
"The Democrats have been silent" on such issues, the Trump administration wants the government to pay a smaller share of crop insurance, and the 2018 Farm Bill "does little to address the current price/income problems," with no new policies, they write, and existing programs "are simply inadequate to address the multi-year price problem that farmers are facing."
"While there are alternate policies preferred by different farmers and farm organizations, there is virtually no dissension on identifying the problem," they write. "At the same time, farmers from left, right, and center agree that the current low prices are disastrous. Some see echoes of the 1980s in the rising level of farm bankruptcies."
Trump and the Democrats need to visit "rural, agricultural areas and listen and learn," write Ray and Schaffer, of UT's Agricultural Policy Research Center. "The candidates need to understand that the current low-price situation is no anomaly; agriculture is characterized by long periods of low prices punctuated by single years and short periods of higher prices."
And what should the politicians do? "From the perspective of social stability and humanitarian concerns, the objective should be to cultivate and maintain an agricultural sector in which productive capacity always exceeds current demand. To do otherwise would be ethically unacceptable." And what are political leaders doing to accomplish that? "From our perspective: not much."
"The Democrats have been silent" on such issues, the Trump administration wants the government to pay a smaller share of crop insurance, and the 2018 Farm Bill "does little to address the current price/income problems," with no new policies, they write, and existing programs "are simply inadequate to address the multi-year price problem that farmers are facing."
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