President Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to announce April tariffs on all imported food, framing the move as a boon to U.S. farmers who will produce even more product for domestic consumption. But the MAGA movement is revealing a gap in its economic logic, and it will cost U.S. consumers and producers dearly.
Consider the video posted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., wherein the “Make America Healthy Again” leader pledged to work in coordination with the Department of Agriculture to ban all agricultural chemicals and pesticides used for farming if they’d been restricted overseas.
Americans love to cite Europe for policy experiments, but not everything that happens on the old continent should be treated as secret knowledge which Americans lack.
As a journalist covering European agriculture, I witnessed the sharp decline of farm profitability in the European Union. More than 5 million farmers have gone out of business there over the last two decades. Europe leads the world in restrictions on the use of herbicides such as atrazine, which was banned in 2004. Neonicotinoid insecticides were then limited in 2013.
As new taxes on diesel were introduced atop fertilizers restrictions and the pesticide bans, farmer protests shut down roadways in London, Paris, Berlin and parts of Poland over the last two years. Manure was sprayed on government buildings and cities shut down, forcing regulators to reassess. It’s not hard to imagine how a U.S. copycat movement could spring up under similar conditions.
Europe regulates using the “precautionary principle” in all things, including agriculture. In practice, it means regulators don’t need to prove that a chemical is directly having adverse effects — mere suspicion is enough to justify a ban.
To obscure the economic losses, Europe spends twice as much on farm subsidies per acre compared to the U.S., and associated programs make up over a third of the entire EU budget.
Farmers in Europe are seriously struggling. Productivity is down, farmers are stuck relying on subsidies to make a profit and navigate the regulatory labyrinth.
It didn’t used to be this way. A 2004 USDA report showed that the U.S. was underperforming Europe on crop productivity, but today this has flipped, with the exception of wheat.
This fully coincides with Europe’s hesitancy to adopt modern technology, including crop protection chemicals and genetic engineering, which remains illegal in the EU.
America has made itself great by basing its food production system on innovation and a light regulatory touch. We need to stay grounded in the basics, and that means recognizing that feeding millions of people is about scalability, accessibility and price.
Americans aren’t just richer than the rest of the world because they make more nominal dollars; it’s also because their purchasing power is greater. Households in the U.S. spend less of their disposable income on food than Europeans, despite also spending less of their tax dollars on subsidizing farmers.
Pesticides don’t have a good reputation, in no small part due to environmental lawyers such as RFK Jr. But they do go through rigorous safety testing in the U.S. and overseas. Glyphosate, for example, the weed killer most targeted by Kennedy’s anti-modern farming narrative, remains legal even under the EU’s rigorous regulatory framework.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins appeared on Fox Business in February to bemoan the former Biden administration’s inability to bring food prices under control, because of the increase in prices for inputs. Rollins was right — the increase in prices for synthetic pesticides and fertilizers inflates food prices.
Now imagine the cost of banning those inputs.
There is nothing wrong with scrutiny of any chemical solution we use to produce food, but after decades of scientists holistically reviewing these products, it is past time to realize RFK Jr.’s position is rooted more in nostalgia than science. And nostalgia will not feed the world.
Bill Wirtz is a senior policy analyst at the Consumer Choice Center, where he focuses on agriculture and trade in the European Union and North America.
