SEQUIM—Rural voters were a big factor in Donald Trump’s second term election last November, although Washington State voters sent in their mail ballots 59% for Kamala Harris. Even here in rural Clallam County, voters favored the Democrat with a 54% margin. Yet now, in rural Republican districts, farmers are expressing anger, fears, and frustration about Trump’s tariffs on farm produce, his deportation of migrant farm workers, and his freeze on the Agriculture Department funding that benefits family farmers. Cutbacks in funding for farmer-friendly programs are coupled with billions more in taxpayer-funded handouts to corporate agribusiness.
Republicans are now threatening major cuts in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which, if inflicted, will mean a worsening of hunger and malnutrition across the U.S. The USDA programs that feed the poor and children are highly popular among farmers and their organizations.
Capital Press, a Salem, Oregon-based newspaper dedicated to farmers, loggers, and other rural communities, carried a banner headline in its Jan. 31 edition that proclaimed, “Everyone’s Nervous” with a subhead, “Despite optimism about Trump, some policies trouble Farm Bureau.”
The article quotes American Farm Bureau (AFB) President Zippy Duvall in his speech to the AFB convention in San Antonio on Jan. 26: “Everyone’s nervous….we don’t know what steps the full deportation plan has in it.”
Duvall said mass deportation of farmworkers, labor shortages, and a trade war that could destroy farm exports “is on farmers’ minds everywhere I go.” This is from AFB, a reliably Republican outfit with many farmer members now expressing “Buyer Regret.”
Here in Washington State, the export of grain, fruit, and logs are key industries that provide many thousands of jobs. Also on the front page of Capital Press is an article headlined, “Trump’s Broad Deportation Order Fuels Fear, Speculation.” The article warns that Trump’s war on immigrants fuels fears “that what is now official policy will rope in tens of thousands of farmworkers.”
Erik Nicholson, of Kennewick, Washington, a former National Vice President of the United Farmworkers, told Capital Press that it isn’t only actual deportation but mass fear that makes farmworkers “reluctant to go to work.” These workers fear arrest by Border Patrol and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and instant deportation. “If this were May or June, we would be having a catastrophe in the fields…”
That fear of deportation is a factor here in Clallam County. There are 455 farms in Clallam County, employing 1,190 farmers and farmworkers. Those farms earned $17.8 million in farm produce last year.
As someone living on a 55-acre farm in the county, we lease the land to an organic vegetable grower, charging him only enough per acre to cover taxes and insurance. A similar war against immigrants in 2017 was unleashed with Border Patrol vehicles cruising on Ward Road beside our farm. The crews of Latino farmworkers who tilled and harvested crops on our farm disappeared overnight. The vegetable grower was left to tend the acres by himself, an impossible task.
Part of the offensive was the imposition by the Border Patrol of checkpoints on U.S. Highway 101, with all traffic halted while the officers demanded proof of citizenship. Outrage grew over these delays among motorists struggling to get to work on time. Not forgotten was the arrest of 17-year-old Edgar Ayala on Highway 101 near his home in Forks, his home since infancy. Ayala was the captain of the Forks High School wrestling team, and his grades were so high that he was a member of the Honor Society. The Border Patrol arrested him, whisked him to Seattle, and deported him to Mexico within hours of his detention.
The community organized a grassroots “Stop the Checkpoints Committee” that mobilized marches, rallies, and street corner vigils demanding a halt to the Checkpoints. Sheriffs of Clallam and Jefferson counties and all the municipal police announced they would not collaborate in these dragnet arrests. The Border Patrol halted the checkpoints.
Just this past week, the sheriffs on the Olympic Peninsula, city police chiefs of towns and cities, and the commander of the Washington State Patrol announced that they would not join in Trump’s mass arrest and deportation of peaceful undocumented workers.
Trump’s war against immigrant farmworkers raises a grave danger that millions of tons of fruit, grain, and other food commodities will be left to rot on the grounds due to the lack of farm workers to harvest them. It means a collapse of our food delivery system, vastly higher prices for food in our supermarkets, and more concentration of agriculture in the hands of billionaire factory farms.
Rob Larew, President of the National Farmers Union, assailed Trump’s 25% tariffs on food imports from Canada, Mexico, China, and many other nations, warning that these tariffs will “trigger significant retaliation” by all these nations on all U.S. exports to their markets. Farmers “are always the first to bear the brunt of unilateral trade actions.” He added, “Our members have already suffered heavy losses from past trade disputes, especially with China, and have lost valuable market access.”
Larew also blasted Trump’s freeze on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs that benefit family farmers. Larew charged that the USDA spending freeze presents family farmers “with a lot of uncertainty about whether or not it will actually come through” and is “adding to that economic pressure in the countryside.”
MAGA Republicans are determined to inflict ruinous cuts to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). The Republican budget resolution requires the USDA to impose $230 million in cuts before they will enact a new Farm Bill. Even though the GOP has promised no cuts in SNAP food benefits, Republican lawmakers told Politico that “current food aid benefits are caught in the crosshairs.”
SNAP, Food Stamps, the Surplus Food Benefits program—all these nutrition programs enacted over the past half century—are strongly supported by farmers and farmer organizations as a way to address “hunger in America” while also distributing surplus foods to needy people and providing urgently needed subsidies to U.S. farmers.
Liquidation or cutbacks of these benefits by Trump, Elon Musk, and other well-fed billionaires means a worsening of hunger and malnutrition in the U.S., the richest nation in the world.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
