Donald Trump’s stated economic policies have economists “extremely confident that food will get more expensive,” Brown University professor Rachel Friedberg warns.
According to a Saturday report in the Atlantic, while Americans are “very concerned” about the price of groceries, two major Trump campaign “promises — mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more restrictive trade regulations —would almost certainly raise food prices” as a domestic labor shortage and increased import taxes tack costs onto Americans’ grocery bills.
“It’s just very straightforward principles of economics,” Friedberg said, telling the Atlantic the “cause-and-effect dynamic ‘could be my final exam.’”
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As the Atlantic reports, “the farm industry is already in a prolonged labor crisis.”
If Trump makes good on his campaign promise to “deport every undocumented immigrant living in the United States, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the people who plant our crops and pick our fruit would leave the domestic workforce,” the Atlantic notes.
“You gotta get the cows milked and fed every day,” David Anderson, a Texas A&M University agricultural economist told the Atlantic, warning it will take time for farms to invest in technological infrastructure to bridge the gap caused by Trump’s policies.
“We wouldn’t be able to produce all the stuff that we do today,” Anderson said. “Less production means less supplies, and less supplies means food prices would go up.”
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Peterson Institute for International Economics Executive Vice President Marcus Noland likewise told the Atlantic “there’s no safety valve” if Trump deports a large swath of the domestic agricultural workforce and follows through on his trade plan.
“If you start deporting people, it’s not like you can import the product and make up for it if you have these tariffs,” Noland said of Trump’s policies.
Read the full report at the Atlantic (subscription required).
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