There was some inflation data out this week that didn’t get a lot of attention. Not the consumer price index, not the Federal Reserve’s go-to personal consumption expenditures report, but import and export prices.
Higher energy costs sent import prices higher in February. Export prices rose too, driven mostly by agricultural products like corn, soybeans and meat.
Part of what’s going on has to do with demand, said Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economics professor at Kansas State University.
“Each month I put out something called the export demand index. And that particular index has been increasing basically throughout calendar year ‘23 and ‘24,” he said.
Tonsor said that was mostly thanks to a decent global economy.
But these days, he said the uncertainty around tariffs has also been pushing up demand, especially for American beef, pork and chicken.
“If you think we’re moving towards a world where there’s going to be less trade, then yes, it makes sense to kinda proactively buy some of those, get your hands on those items,” he said.
But along with demand, supply has been pushing up prices too.
Back in January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that the fall harvest wasn’t as big as anticipated.
“That was the prompting reason why corn and soybean prices then raced higher in January and early February,” said Naomi Blohm, senior market adviser with Total Farm Marketing.
She said higher export prices can be welcome news, especially for corn growers.
“There’s not a lot of places that the world can get corn from. It’s the United States. We grow about a third of the world’s corn,” she said.
But American soybean farmers have a lot of competition from Brazil and Argentina, Blohm said.
And the concern is that if soybean prices get too high, buyers will look elsewhere, especially as the trade war continues.
“The risk going forward would be: So we lose export demand because of the trade and tariff issues potentially coming,” Blohm said.
That means a lot of farmers wouldn’t benefit from today’s higher prices, said Aleks Schaefer, a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University.
“We have to make decisions today about how many animals we’re raising, how much meat we’re going to produce in six months, based on what prices are going to be tomorrow,” he said.
If those tariffs reduce demand for products like soybeans, which have a lot of competition, farmers might cut back on production.
Tonsor at Kansas State said that could also happen to pork or chicken producers, who also have a lot of global competitors.
“That’s the concern on when you disrupt trade: You encourage somebody to build a new business relationship, and if and when they do, they may not come back,” he said.
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