The United States government has announced a $12 billion short-term plan to help American farmers caught in the crossfire of President Donald Trump’s trade disputes with China and other US trading partners.

According to Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue, the plan will help a broad number of farmers deal with the cost of disruptive markets as US trading partners have retaliated for President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported goods.

Trump had during a speech in Kansas City said that farmers would be the biggest beneficiaries of his trade agenda as he seeks better trade agreements, declaring that the new tariffs were the greatest and threatening to impose additional penalties on US trading partners.

“Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on trade negotiates, gets a fair deal or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that – and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the “piggy bank” that’s being robbed. All will be Great!,” Trump tweeted.

 

The Trump administration had slapped tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods in a dispute over Beijing’s high-tech industrial policies while China has retaliated by imposing duties on soybeans and pork, affecting Midwest farmers in a region of the country that supported the president in his 2016 campaign.

Trump has also threatened to place tariffs on up to $500 billion in products imported from China, a move that would dramatically ratchet up the stakes in the trade dispute involving the globe’s biggest economies.

The president has engaged in hard-line trading negotiations with China, Canada and the European Union, seeking to renegotiate trade agreements he says have undermined the nation’s manufacturing base and led to a wave of job losses in recent decades.