Trump’s tariffs in his first term led to the first agricultural trade deficits in decades.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler
“Four years of Joe Biden left American agriculture with a $50 BILLION trade deficit — totally erasing the Trump trade surplus he inherited. The price was paid by our small towns and rural communities, stricken by the worst times for American agriculture in nearly a century.”
— Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in a social media post, March 28
As President Donald Trump prepares to levy massive tariffs on other countries this week, Rollins weighed in with a blast at the Biden administration regarding the trade deficit on agricultural products. In her telling, President Joe Biden squandered an agricultural trade surplus he inherited from Trump, harming farmers.
The agricultural trade deficit did soar in the final two years of the Biden administration. But it’s a stretch to say Biden inherited a trade surplus — and the roots of this problem started with tariffs that Trump imposed in his first term.
The Facts
We received a nonresponsive comment from the Agriculture Department (more on that below) but let’s first dissect Rollins’s post.
The federal government operates on fiscal years that start in October. In fiscal 2020, U.S. agricultural products ran a trade deficit of $3.7 billion, meaning that the value of imports exceeded exports by that amount of money. In the 2020 calendar year, however, there was a surplus of $3.4 billion.
Could Rollins have been referring to calendar years? If so, she was inconsistent. Her post refers to a $50 billion trade deficit. USDA’s Economic Research Service in February projected a $49 billion trade deficit for fiscal 2025.
In other words, it appears that Rollins is claiming a surplus under Trump using a calendar-year standard and a deficit under Biden using a fiscal-year standard. That’s not kosher. Under conventional government accounting, Biden inherited a trade deficit. Moreover, fiscal 2025 is really mostly part of Trump’s second term, which means it’s going to be recorded as his deficit.
Until Trump became president in 2017, for many years the United States ran a big surplus in agricultural trade, even as overall trade deficits kept rising. The 2024 fiscal year trade deficit ($32 billion) was only the fourth such deficit in 50 years; 2023 ($17 billion), 2020 ($3.7 billion) and 2019 ($1.3 billion) were also deficit years. It’s all rather recent — and the trend started in Trump’s first term.
There are many factors that affect trade deficits. Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, trade deficits are not all bad. Often they occur because one country has a product that another country needs — and vice versa. Americans drink a lot of coffee but, with small exceptions in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the United States barely grows any coffee beans. So the American coffee habit is going to add to the trade deficit, as coffee beans need to be shipped to the United States from other countries.
Betty Resnick, an economist at the Farm Bureau, which represents farmers and ranchers, points to another benefit of trade — ground beef. U.S. producers raise fattier beef (because Americans like premium steaks), so much of the beef imported to the United States are lean cuts that are mixed in with U.S. beef to produce ground beef. Trade is often mutually beneficial in these ways.
AgAmerica, which provides financing to farmers, and the Farm Bureau place most of the blame for the rising agricultural trade deficit on the strong U.S. dollar. That makes it cheaper for Americans to buy goods from overseas — but American products become more expensive for people in other countries. Shipping costs have also risen, which also makes American products more costly. So other countries have turned away from the U.S. market and sought substitution goods from less expensive alternatives.
This brings us to Trump’s first term. He imposed tariffs on China, and Beijing stopped buying U.S. soybeans, hogs, cotton and other products in response. In fact, U.S. farmers were so hurt by the tariff war in his first term that Trump authorized $28 billion in payments to make up their losses — which wiped out a good chunk of the revenue raised by the tariffs.
The legacy of those actions continues today. China began buying corn from Brazil, which in 2023 displaced the United States as the world’s biggest corn exporter. China, which accounts for 60 percent of soybean imports, also began buying more of its soybeans from Brazil than the United States. Before Trump imposed tariffs, the United States sold 62 percent of its soybeans to China — and that plunged to 18 percent in 2018, with most of the trade shifting to Brazil. The soybean trade with China never fully recovered, averaging just over 50 percent since 2020. “Efforts by China to become less dependent on agricultural imports from the U.S. are also having an impact,” Resnick said.
A final factor is that the rest of the world has been teaming up on free trade deals while the United States has stood aloof. Trump withdrew the U.S. signature on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but the other 11 countries in the deal remained on course, cutting tariffs for other exporters on the Pacific Rim and, according to Resnick, shrinking the market share for American products ranging from frozen fries to blueberries to pet food.
When we asked about Rollins’s post, we received an email from an unnamed spokesperson: “The tweet is correct in that the first Trump Administration had a trade surplus over four years and the Biden administration had a 2x bigger trade deficit over 4 years in agriculture.”
As we noted above, this was not responsive and even changed the meaning of the post, suggesting the agency knows her post was incorrect — both in claiming Trump left behind a surplus and in blaming Biden for fiscal 2025. Trump did not leave behind a trade surplus; he left behind a deficit. Biden, in his first two years, achieved surpluses, before he had two years of deficits. Trump also has two years of surpluses — until he began running deficits for the first time in decades. Now’s he’s on track to have a deficit again in the first year of his second term.
The Pinocchio Test
It’s par for the course for a Trump administration official to blame Biden. But Rollins incorrectly said Trump left behind a trade surplus — and sidesteps Trump’s role in his first term in making U.S. agriculture less competitive on the global market. Moreover, there are factors like a strong U.S. dollar that are largely beyond a president’s control — as Trump may well find. Rollins tried to blame Biden for the fiscal 2025 deficit, but that’s mostly on Trump’s watch.
Rollins earns Four Pinocchios.
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