MICHIGAN — At a NewsNation town hall hosted by Chris Cuomo Thursday evening, VP hopeful J.D. Vance was asked about the Trump-Vance priorities for domestic agriculture policy.
The question came from Robert Ruhlig, a fourth-generation Michigan farmer who wanted to know his administration’s plan to help American farmers survive and succeed in a globalized market. Transcript below.
RUHLIG: I'm a fourth-generation farmer, in fact we sell our produce right across the street here at the Eastern Market. How will your administration, after seeing what we went through after COVID and the important respect to domestic food production, help the American farmer to survive the increasing inflationary cost of doing business in global competition?
VANCE: Yeah. Thanks for the question Robert, and you know one thing you probably know, Robert, because you're a farmer but a lot of people don't realize, and this is maybe the scariest statistic of the last few years, is that America just last year became a net importer of food.
What that means is that we grow less food than our people consume, which makes us reliant on other people for the very food that we feed our children. I think that's very very dangerous and part of the reason is because we've made it so hard on our farmers.
Now, when I talk to farmers and, you know, Ohio, I represent the state of Ohio, don't hold it against me Michigan, but I talk to a lot of farmers in the state of Ohio because we've got a lot of them, I know Michigan has a lot of farmers too. You know one of the things that I hear is that between natural gas prices—because natural gas is a big part of the fertilizer that farmers use—between diesel costs, between gasoline costs, the cost of energy has made it really, really hard for our farmers to actually do what they do and grow the food that we need. So we’ve got to bring down energy costs to make it more affordable for farmers to do what they do.
The other thing is that we had to make sure that foreign competitors aren't flooding our markets with cheap agricultural products that destroy, thank you, that destroy the wages and the livelihoods of farmers, but again it makes us more reliant on countries that ultimately don't like us.
This is something we got to be very, very worried about.
What we learned, you mentioned this I think Chris, during COVID, is that we became so dependent on foreign countries for the supply chains, right, we couldn't get like hospital masks and hospital gowns in the midst of a pandemic because China made a lot of that stuff. Well if we're worried about manufactured goods, how much worse is it to rely on other countries for the very food that we provide to our families? We've got to go in the other direction and cut down on agricultural dumping.
One of the ways you do this, and this is a big difference between President Trump and Kamala Harris, is Kamala Harris has really criticized the idea of using tariffs. President Trump has said, rightfully in my view, obviously I'm a little biased, but that unless you're willing to use tariffs to go after countries that are manipulating our own markets—whether it's food, energy, or manufactured goods—you're going to be giving up on American productive workers. We can't do that. We've got to protect our farms, protect our manufacturers, make more of our own stuff, grow more of our own food, and that's fundamentally the President Trump approach to these things.
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