Last week, before President Trump left for a trip to Asia, he announced that he would help Argentina to recover from their debt crisis by giving the country up to 40 billion dollars, and in turn, Argentina will send the U.S. $40 billion in beef to alleviate the the U.S. beef shortage, while lowering the price of beef for consumers. Response from U.S. beef producers has been swift and irate, citing several years of enduring increasing input costs, low beef prices, and drought that has dried up pastures and ranges, while producers were barely able to break even, and finally they are able to recoup some of the losses they have accrued over the past few years. Adding insult to injury, Trump posted on social media that American cattle ranchers "have to get their prices down," and that the tariffs he's enacted are "the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades. The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible! "It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!" Note, that we import beef, not cattle from Brazil.
According to USDA data, from 2020 to 2024, the U.S. imported a yearly average of $7.6 billion of beef from Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil, while exporting $7.2 billion of beef to South Korea, Japan, China, Mexico and other Asian nations. The idea that the U.S. would recoup the $40 billion loan through importation of Argentine beef any time soon is unrealistic. Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines said, “The answer is to let the markets continue to recover, and to allow ranchers to finally make money again.” Adam Murray, a beef cattle extension specialist at Cornell University, points out that it would take at least two years for Argentina to ramp up its own beef supply before it could send any large quantity of beef to the U.S. Another concern about Argentine beef importations is that although Argentina is declared free of foot-and-mouth disease by the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the country supplements their national meat supply with importations of fresh, chilled or frozen beef and pork from regions that the USDA considers to be affected with that disease. So, there is concern that meat from Argentina might have been commingled with the fresh meat of animals from an affected region, causing an undue risk of introducing foot-and-mouth disease into the United States, which would be devastating for U.S. livestock producers and to the U.S. agricultural economy. Also, U.S. livestock Associations contend that importing beef from Argentina is not a guarantee that it would lead to lower prices at meat counters. Ethan Lane, National Cattlemen's Beef Association Senior Vice President of Government Affairs stated that quadrupling of the quota for Argentinian beef would have a “negligible impact” on “the cattle supply chain and on the prices consumers would pay at grocery store meat counters,” because, “the fact is we are not talking about a tremendous amount of beef, but we’re looking at additional beef coming from a trading partner that we’ve had long-standing concerns with, because they are not good stewards of cattle health.”
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking"
