Search Site   
News Stories at a Glance
Deere 4440 cab tractor racked up $18,000 at farm retirement auction
Indiana legislature passes bills for ag land purchases, broadband grants
Make spring planting safety plans early to avoid injuries
Michigan soybean grower visits Dubai to showcase U.S. products
Scientists are interested in eclipse effects on crops and livestock
U.S. retail meat demand for pork and beef both decreased in 2023
Iowa one of the few states to see farms increase in 2022 Ag Census
Trade, E15, GREET, tax credits the talk at Commodity Classic
Ohioan travels to Malta as part of US Grains Council trade mission
FFA members learn about Australian culture, agriculture during trip
Timing of Dicamba ruling may cause issues for 2024 planting
   
Archive
Search Archive  
   
Views and opinions: Another kind of war to end all wars

Nov. 11 marked 100 years since the end of World War I, which U.S. President Woodrow Wilson called “the war to end all wars.”

Wilson saw himself as a historic peacemaker; instead, he became an ironic phrasemaker. The Great War never brought an end to war, or even an end to that war. The then-raging Russian civil war continued for three more bloody years.

Moreover, historians now estimate more than 100 million military personnel, civilians and victims of genocide died in 20th century warfare that followed The Great War’s “peace” in 1918.

Worse, all that horror occurred despite a century of new institutions – the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, SEATO, the European Union, the IMF, ASEAN, the G-20, the G-7, GATT, the WTO, the World Bank and the OAS, to name but a few – designed to prevent war, promote peace and underwrite global prosperity.

Today, some of those same institutions are failing to prevent another age-old conflict: Trade wars.

For example, China and the United States are engaged in an epic trade battle that both continue to escalate. On Jan. 1, 2019, in fact, the current White House-imposed 10 percent tariff on $200 billion of imported Chinese goods will rise to 25 percent.

How do you think China will respond?

But this trade fight, like most wars, isn’t only bilateral. At the just-concluded Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, a gathering of 21 nations that rim the Pacific Ocean, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Chinese President Xi Jinping hammered each other for their mutual trade intransigence.

The hostility, The New York Times reported, was “reminiscent of the uncompromising rhetoric heard during the Cold War.” Peter O’Neill, prime minister of the meeting’s host nation, Papua New Guinea, said Xi’s and Pence’s words frightened all: “The entire world is worried.”

The picture is equally troubling off America’s other coast. Presently, the European Union is looking at the twin barrels of a deadly trade fight with both Great Britain and the U.S. that, three short years ago, would have been seen as preposterous.

But in June 2016 British voters narrowly approved “Brexit,” a vote to leave the European Union, and five months later U.S. voters elevated Donald J. Trump to the presidency.

Both results signaled a rise of populist nationalism and a setback for the “liberal world order,” an international recognition by disparate nations to follow rules-based institutions (the UN, WTO, NATO, others) to foster political stability and economic peace.

Like American farmers and ranchers caught in the Trump-Xi trade fight, British farmers now face an uncertain future as British Prime Minister Theresa May beseeches her deeply split fellow Conservatives in Parliament to approve a “leave” deal recently negotiated with the EU.

It’s an uphill fight for the Prime Minister that may cost May her job whether she wins or loses. Her winning – leaving the EU, that is – will likely cost British farmers almost $4 billion in ag payments they receive each year under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.

American farmers and ranchers are also entering their own winter of discontent. Few market analysts or land-grant economists have measured the actual rural cost of White House trade actions against Mexico, Canada, the EU and China.

The USDA, however, pegs the American tab at $12 billion, the money it authorized the Commodity Credit Corp. to borrow to “mitigate the trade damages sustained” by tariff-slowed markets.

More troublesome than even the cost, however, is that there is no end in sight to the fights. Tough talk and more digging in have replaced any olive branch or kind gesture.

As such, these nearly worldwide trade battles eerily resemble the stalemated trench warfare that was the deadly hallmark of World War I – the war that didn’t end all wars.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Alan Guebert may write to him in care of this publication.

11/29/2018