It comes as no surprise that neither of the main candidates in the American presidential campaign have a coherent agriculture policy. That’s no different from most political campaigns in this country, being we live in highly urbanized societies with no connection to agriculture.
The Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump, is in a unique position regarding agriculture. Surveys show that he has majority support of voters in rural America, which traditionally votes Republican. But Trump is the archetypical city slicker from New York City who seemingly has no clue how food is produced, processed and distributed. If he had, he would have tempered his comments on wanting to deport all illegal immigrants and prevent any more from coming into the United States. The reality is big time commercial agriculture and horticulture in the United States requires those hard-working illegal folks to annually harvest and pick billions of dollars’ worth of fruit and vegetables in most parts of the United States. If all of those people were deported it would create a financial and production disaster for American agriculture and could cause severe food shortages across the continent. Its one of those perverse consequences of self-righteous political positions – in other words, “be careful what you wish for.”
There is a continuing myth that if illegal immigrants were deported, then all the jobs they had would be taken up by citizens and legal immigrants. In most cases our fellow citizens have shown they are not interested in such back-breaking stoop labour. To be fair, if wages for such hard labour were doubled or tripled and working conditions improved, more legal people would probably become interested. But that’s not likely to happen in open competitive markets that include cheap imports. To forestall criticism of the Trump immigration policy and its negative impact on ag production with rural voters, Trump strategists are stating that he will be flexible on his immigration stance once he becomes the President. For the sake of food production in the United States and consumers in both countries, we hope so.
On the other hand, Democratic Party candidate Hilary Clinton has stated that she will not deport illegal immigrants, which should be of some relief to commercial American agriculture and horticulture. The irony is that rural voters are not consistent supporters of the Democratic party and are unlikely to change their minds. The political contradiction is that millions of rural Americans may be voting agriculture into financial disaster by voting for Trump. Unlike the Trump campaign, the Clinton campaign platform does have an actual agriculture policy, but it is filled with the usual boilerplate and political platitudes used by most city-based political parties. That would be; support the family farm, more profitable ag production and more rural development. Democratic party policies have, over the years, become more antagonistic towards large scale commercial agriculture being that they associate it with corporate conspiracies to take over global food production.
The Democratic platform does contain some pointed emphasis on the development of wind and solar power as the way to increase economic prosperity in rural America. The idea is that building windmills and solar panels on every farm and ranch will provide an entirely new source of rental income for land owners. That’s a rather frightening visual perspective and a waste of precious land, but such political views are trendy with the liberal politically-correct crowd. The Democrats are determined to wipe out coal fired electricity plants and the linked coal mining industry, and replace it with renewable energy – it’s all so simple to those folks. Fortunately for Alberta, all those renewable energy sources will have to be backed up by natural gas electricity plants.
What both nominees do support is a continuation of federal ethanol production subsidization, albeit with differing enthusiasm. The outgoing Democratic administration was an ardent supporter of this program as it seemingly supported more corn production and supposedly reduced the use of evil fossil fuels like gasoline. The Democrats want such subsidization extended to cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel produced from grasses, wood, algae, or other plants. Trump has no ethanol policy and is likely unaware of the role it plays in corn production, its pricing, and the rural –based refining industry. He is opposed to government regulation which is central to how ethanol is marketed in the United States.
Curiously, it would seem that neither nominee is seen as positive for American agriculture, and as the saying goes, “wait it gets worse,” when one examines their position on trade policy. More on that next time.