As the U.S.-initiated trade war with China drags on, farmers -- known for their patience -- are losing confidence in Washington's strategy confronting the world's most populous nation.
"Our farmers would rather have markets and get things back to normal -- they've been damaged by dropping commodity prices," said Brad Erker, executive director at Colorado Wheat.
As Montana agro-economist Anton Bekkerman told Xinhua, "farmers are getting hit on both ends by the trade war."
U.S. media reported that increased costs for aluminum and steel, and lower prices for crops, mostly attributable to tariffs, are forcing many American farmers to hold off purchasing large, expensive equipment.
Since 2017, revenue from Chinese agricultural exports dropped by more than half, from 19.5 billion U.S. dollars to 9.2 billion dollars in 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The USDA also found that farm income fell 45 percent over the same period. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, farm bankruptcies have increased by 13 percent since 2018.
North Dakota wheat farmer Bob Kuylen told the MSNBC television network this week that they had lost pretty much all of their markets since 2017.
"Some farmers cannot switch or invest in another crop -- there is a gap in getting crops planted," Erker told Xinhua.
Bekkerman and national agro-economists have warned that trade relationships cannot be rebuilt overnight, and may take years, even decades, to rekindle.
"Countries like Russia and Ukraine are definitely not slipping backwards -- they're getting stronger," he said Tuesday, of two new sources of field crops for the Chinese populace.
Erker, raised on a dryland wheat farm in Morgan County, Colorado, became Colorado Wheat's executive director in 2017.
When the trade war hit, Erker joined a chorus of wheat groups urging the government to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), both which were canned by the Trump administration.
Erker said that Mexico is now buying wheat from Argentina, as the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA) flounders in the U.S. Congress.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters Wednesday that "it's better if this gets resolved soon. It's in the interest of all three nations," he said, referring to the possible delay of USMCA ratification due to the upcoming U.S. 2020 presidential election.
Last month, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told nervous Midwestern farmers "he's confident" that they'll eventually regain previous markets.
"These markets just don't come back -- they take years to establish," agro-economist Vince Smith told Xinhua.
Kuylen, who is also vice president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, said he once could expect "up to a dollar bonus" on the high protein wheat crops he sold to Asian markets -- a margin that has now shrunk to five cents.
"One of my young neighbors told me the other day his banker said if wheat doesn't hit 4.50 U.S. dollars, there's going to be a bloodbath this fall," Kuylen told MSNBC. "It's not looking good for farmers at all."
