this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Summary

Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.

The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.

The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.

Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.

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[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago

Everyone knows international aid is to support local economies

I don’t think anything is backfiring

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 26 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

"gambit"

Sure, let's call it that.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 7 points 4 hours ago

The famous chess move: king's gambit. Sacrifice your king for victory. Wait a minute . . .

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 49 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I hope every farmer who voted for Trump loses their farm. Literally.

[–] Guy6758@lemmy.world 11 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Seriously fuck these people its obvious what Trump is about. He did this the first time he was in office

[–] BlindFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=102979

A 2022 US dept of agriculture publication, the overview: "This report provides a detailed look at the impact of retaliatory [2018] tariffs by State and commodity and estimates the direct export losses associated with the trade conflict." Added 2018 for context

Takes two clicks to get to the summary. I can't tell what the US even won out of the war, but looks like we lost damn bigly. And are pushing the same tarrifs again 💀

[–] slingstone@lemmy.world 13 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I think that would affect the rest of us, because that means family farms might be taken over by corporations, which is already a huge problem. Because of the downstream effects on the nation as a whole, I sincerely hope they learn their damned lesson.

Do they deserve to lose everything for their stupidity? Sure. Do the rest of us deserve to pay for their stupidity with an increasingly corporatized or weakened agricultural base? No.

[–] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 10 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Most small farms die when the next family member in line to take over doesn’t want to do it. This is personal for me because my father was a farmer and died when I was a teenager. My family now just rent out the land we own and I ended up not becoming a farmer because I don’t want to die young like he did. Farming is a stressful as hell job and it’s getting more expensive to even get into it anymore unless you got investors or inherit everything like my father did. If you don’t, then you’ll be in debt forever.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago

Wait until they cut crop insurance subsidies.

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 6 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Hopefully, they lose it to agricorps, and then get pissed about being exploited, and come back on the side of the working class.

[–] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

I once thought it was that simple so I understand where people on here are coming from on all this. But after ten years in the San Joaquin valley, ag central, I can tell you, having grown up in Seattle and thus seeing the contrast, there is a distinct power in fundamental formal education and when that is lacking it doesn't matter what happens to them, the powers-that-be always know how gullible they are and will mold them like playdoh. I think the schools need to be funded by the central government not local governments. Big city liberals should have to put up frankly with their local neighborhood schools being taken down a few notches through evenly spreading education funds across jurisdictions if they don't want schools way out in the boondocks to be as vapid as one finds them. If you won't pay for their education my attitude is don't complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence. I find that hard myself - I get frustrated all the time with the people in this small town, but I still try to remind myself what I've learned about education itself and I try to have compassion. Maybe that's what ten years out in the boondocks teaches a Seattleite.

[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 2 points 4 hours ago

Well, if they don't turn around, they become far less effectual when dirt poor, thanks to the system they created. And the poorer they are, the faster they die off.

If you won’t pay for their education my attitude is don’t complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence.

We already do pay for their education. What do you think the Department of Ed does? Title IX funding? It comes from blue states.

I try to have compassion

I'll have compassion for them, once they stop being class traitors.

[–] FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago

Right? Reap what you sow lol

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 40 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Donald Trump may have thought that defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would only hurt foreigners -- but it turns out he could actually be mistaken.

😮

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 11 points 7 hours ago

"May have thought" - that would be to strong for him. Thinking has never been his strong point. He reacts to what people around him tell him. He picks up ideas at random and turns them into executive orders.

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 63 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

Almost like they don't know what the purpose of government is...

[–] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 hours ago

You're currently watching an amalgam of Nazi Germany and the levellers and diggers from the 17th century England.

Currently you are experiencing what happens when a bunch of angry people have no plans on what to do after their anger is exhausted. There is no interest in doing anything but burn it all to the ground.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 14 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The purpose of government is to funnel taxpayer money into the hands of the rich, and to enforce laws against the poor, duh.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago

The purpose of the government is to ensure nobody can say "woke" stuff, apparently.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 20 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

And almost like they don't realize that large portions of the US economy is highly dependent on the US's interventionalist stance.

It's like every fucking kid learns in history class. The biggest beneficiary of the US Marshall plan was the US - the US is constantly making international decisions that drive more business to the US... those decisions usually start as deficits driving aide abroad and then form strong economic and diplomatic bonds that benefit everyone.

Trump is torpedoing the US's relationships abroad and by doing so the US economy.

[–] theangryseal@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 8 points 7 hours ago

Britain had to fuck up and destabilize a shitload of countries to build its empire. China is being handed it's global dominance on a silver platter due to the fact that the US several other Western nations are too far up their own white supremacist libertarian assholes to actually fix shit.

I mean Milei in Argentina is such an unmitigated disaster it isn't funny, but they praise him like he is somehow uplifting the country when now 7 out of 10 Argentinian children are living in poverty.

[–] 2pt_perversion@lemmy.world 34 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Farmers are going to get hammered with retaliatory tariffs on exports too. Time for them to find out I guess.

[–] Red89@lemm.ee 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

If they didn't learn last go around, do we expect them to this time. I remember during his first term, his tarrifs made China reduce purchasing (I forgot which crop) from the US. Instead, they looked to other countries like Brazil. To combat the lost revenue to farmers, he created a fund to aid them.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago
[–] But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 127 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

Something like almost 80% of farmers voted Trump. Those leopards are eating good

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 10 points 9 hours ago

They’ll stand by their vote while blaming democrats for the dei hires responsible for their farms getting shut down.

[–] Paddzr@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

Ah yes, the Brexiters! Quite an overlap of talking points too. Minus the healthcare, there's non to speak of in US.

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 38 points 18 hours ago

Those leopards are eating good

The leopards are becoming obese now, WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE LEOPARDS

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 20 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, we won't be in the coming months.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 hours ago

Unlikely. This is food that was going overseas. This could actually bring food prices down while bankrupting farmers. The next few seasons of crops is when we start to starve.

[–] SarcasticMan@lemmy.world 167 points 20 hours ago (9 children)

They write these stories like this isn't the result he is looking for. The point is to crash, not rebuild; nothing the Trump administration is doing is geared to help, rebuild, or make America great. That's not how they make money. The more I see, the more I hear the more I am convinced the whole point is to destabilize and rebuild to get rid of that pesky constitution.

Maybe I am just angry or doomsaying, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look that way, and to make matters even worse, people just can't wrap their heads around the whole organized minority rules over the unorganized majority thing.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 0 points 4 hours ago

It's almost leftist cliche to say the system is full of contradictions. Nobody intentionally builds a system full of contradictions, but you get there by not paying attention to what you're doing.

Which is to say that they don't plan to do that. They just don't know what the hell they're doing.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 87 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

They write these stories like this isn’t the result he is looking for. The point is to crash, not rebuild;

I'm noticing a slightly different pattern with these actions. I don't think trump and his cronies were actually seeking to hurt farmers, but something else.

  1. hurt everyone temporary to see who screams.
  2. Those that scream that are opponents, continue to deny them the government benefit
  3. Those that are allies, extract concessions and/or pledges of fealty before returning the same benefit they had before.
  4. For those that don't scream, or don't scream loud enough, simply pocket the benefit for himself and his own goals.

nothing the Trump administration is doing is geared to help, rebuild, or make America great.

Agreed.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.

Then just fix that.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Basically pull all the cables and see what breaks that you care about.

Then just fix that.

Yes. In IT we call this the "scream test". This feels like that with added corruption.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Incidentally, Musk did exactly that at Twitter. He blamed the developers for his own recklessness ("I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it") when the infrastructure team strongly warned him ahead of time that this needed to be done carefully to avoid issues.

Which indicates that he learned nothing. Now he's doing the same to the federal government.

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[–] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 33 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

And on the way down, connected rich people have already shorted select industries' stocks, then will buy in bigtime after the crash to profit on the long way back up.

The rich get richer.

EDIT: the way back up won't be so long, as theh recovery will be aided by big bailouts (or bail-ins) at the taxpayers' expense. So we'll get screwed not one, not two, but THREE ways.

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[–] JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 29 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

Mate, the orange halfwit has just flooded a huge number of farms in California. They're still gonna vote for him.

[–] ShepherdPie@midwest.social 16 points 17 hours ago

I don't know if him opening the dams flooded any farms, but come summertime, they're going to be hurting as the reservoirs empty out long before they should have.

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[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 25 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Seriously, only people permanently stuck in adolescence with bullshit Libertarian notions about government believe that you can BREAK government and things will turn out well.

Only a dumbfuck Randroid type (or maybe the random leftist veering on wrapping all the way around the horseshoe) thinks that burning it all down is going to lead to better things...it's easy if you are totally ignorant to think that "government doesn't do anything for ME" as an actual thing you believe.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 32 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

... "government doesn't do anything for ME" as an actual thing you believe.

This happens because people take completely for granted all of the things government quietly does for them.

It's kind of the same as "Why do we even have an IT department? Everything works, what are they even doing?"

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Such an apt analogy - this actually happens all the time in corporations. IT tends to just get treated as a cost center, most especially if everything is running smoothly. Stupid people at companies will often just look at the price of that and think it's time to fuck with it...

It's almost the same thing with vaccines. A whole lot of dumbasses think vaccines "never did them no good", because vaccines are a victim of their own success, and most people alive today have not really seen how bad it can get without them [1].

Idiots can then try to pin the state of health we have, largely thanks to vaccines, on other things like septic systems, "eating healthy", etc...

[1] I've anecdotally noticed that for the most part, you didn't see older generations going for that anti-vax shit. It seems to have started with some (younger) boomers, a lot of Gen-Xers and on down. But again, that's because it's an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing. Some of the older people (like Greatest Generation) saw how life can be incredibly cruel w/o vaccines...sadly, all that wisdom is dying out and our education system sucks, so this wisdom was not passed on to enough people. Critical thinking is probably as bad as ever, and we are probably on the verge of FAFO...

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 2 points 7 hours ago

Toxins and crystals and essential oils, oh my!

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[–] randon31415@lemmy.world 19 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Trump: "If food prices are so high, what if we just... keep all the food here? That will bring them down, right?"

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[–] TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 32 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Well, it's what they voted for in their blind hatred of everything that made America great.

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