RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 2 sourcesRanchers and Republicans alike have pushed back on the beef plan
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Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has refused to say which countries the Trump administration is relying on for its plan to temporarily surge beef imports into the U.S. to ease consumer prices.
“I am not privy to talk about that,” Rollins told reporters on Tuesday. “I think the conversations are still going on,” she added, saying that President Trump and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer were involved.
In a Truth Social post on Friday, President Trump claimed he had reached a deal to allow up to 300,000 metric tons of meat destined to become ground beef into the U.S. to be sold at reduced prices for the next 90 days without tariffs or quotas. The plan, Trump said, would “substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families.”
A White House official told The Independent last week that Trump would “formally sign an executive order” to execute the agreement “within the next two weeks.”
Since Trump returned to office last year, the price of ground beef has risen from $5.45 per pound to $6.85 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On Monday, an Arizona border crossing reopened to Mexican cattle , as fears have eased over the spread of the New World screwworm through Mexican cattle imports. The U.S. plans to open more border crossings as part of the beef plan.
The Trump administration’s beef deal has met with stiff resistance from ranchers and Republicans, who argue that allowing more imports will do little to change the underlying conditions that have sent beef prices spiking, such as low herd sizes because of drought.
"Despite high beef prices in grocery stores, prices paid to farmers and ranchers for their cattle have fallen sharply over the past two months, and beef packing plants are shutting down across the U.S.,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said in a statement after the plan was announced.
"Further undercutting a fragile recovery by swamping markets with foreign products and attempting to manipulate prices threatens to wipe out any progress that has been made,” he added.
“I’ve advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them — most of whom are MAGA Republicans,” Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, a Trump ally, said after the president's announcement.
The Trump administration argues the temporary surge in imports won’t impact farmers over the long term and merely represents a fraction of the beef imports that normally would’ve been coming into the U.S. anyway, but for the screwworm.
Agribusiness experts, meanwhile, have doubts over whether the plan will lower prices.
"The administration obviously has a lot of incentive to try to be able to say that they’re doing something about high beef prices in particular," Derrell Peel, an agribusiness professor at Oklahoma State University, recently told the Associated Press. "Beef has been singled out because it is an expensive product and because it’s just high profile."
"I don’t expect to see any measurable impact on cattle prices or beef prices soon," he added.
The White House previously negotiated for thousands of tons of beef imports from Argentina to lower prices , and the president has accused major meat packers of conspiring to keep prices high .
The questions surrounding the beef program come as the Trump administration has reignited its trade war with Canada and continues to strain global fuel prices through the Iran war.
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