Champaign, Ill. — Jonathan W. Coppess is the the Leonard and Lila Gardner Illinois Farm Bureau Family of Companies Endowed Associate Professor in Agricultural Policy at the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Coppess is the author of “Between Soil and Society: Legislative History and Political Development of Farm Bill Conservation Policy” and previously served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. He spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the potential effects of tariffs.
What are tariffs likely to mean to the average U.S. household, and when will consumers start to notice the effects?
The average household will pay more for almost everything from groceries to cars, clothes to homes. Tariffs are simply a tax on imported items. The Trump administration has thus far implemented across-the-board tariffs on most goods with additional tariffs on specific goods in a blunt manner.
As the Trump administration has pointed out, the U.S. runs large trade deficits and it imports much more than it exports. So this impacts a large swath of goods and everyday items directly and many more indirectly, from steel in automobiles to aluminum in beer cans.
What will tariffs mean for U.S. farmers?
The effects will largely be the same for farmers as for consumers, but with the added problems of potential lost export markets that will lower prices and incomes.
For farmers, it hits on both sides of the equation, as it does for employers. Farmers will pay more for imported goods — fertilizer, such as potash from Canada, is a good example — and then lose out on markets and have lower prices for what they produce.
The longer and more disruptive this is, the worse the impact on markets and the future potential markets.
How will tariffs affect the transition to cleaner energy?
It’s not entirely clear. To the extent that it impacts things for solar panels, wind turbines and the steel or other input items used to produce them, it will make them more expensive and harder to procure.
The likely more damaging aspects to cleaner energy are the other moves the administration is making, or threatening to make, against the tax credits and other incentives for the transitional costs to solar and wind.
How will these tariffs affect the price of food, including the food that we import?
The effects will be largely the same: It will increase the price of food and especially food that is imported, such as bananas and coffee. Basically, all items that we don’t produce here will see a rise in prices, but on food we do produce here, the impact of tariffs could also push up prices due to the increased costs and other supply challenges.
Impacts on packaging and the like also could get passed on to the consumer because that is what companies do: They pass these increased costs due to the tariffs on to the consumer.
