Minnesota’s stakes are high in tariff escalation

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“We believe in comparative advantage,” Cargill CEO Brian Sikes said at an Economic Club of Minnesota event last week. “There are natural places where things should be grown.”

Places like Minnesota.

In fact, the home state of the agribusiness giant is itself a giant contributor to the global food system, ranking fourth among states with more than $10 billion exported in 2022 (the latest full-year data available, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture).

That’s backed by the more than 65,000 farms that make Minnesota, according to the department, the top state for sugar beets, turkeys raised, green peas and sweet corn for processing; second in the nation in hogs, wild rice, dry edible beans and spring wheat; third in soybeans, sunflower, canola, dry beans and oats; fourth in corn; fifth in ethanol production; sixth in meat animals, cheese and rye; seventh in wheat, barley, honey, mink pelts and mohair; eighth in dairy milk, snap peas and livestock production; and ninth in potatoes.

Overall, agriculture in Minnesota, the department reports, supports more than 388,000 jobs on farms and beyond, with four of the 17 Minnesota companies on the Fortune 500 list in the ag and food sector.

Most profoundly, the state helps feed the nation and the world. So it’s no wonder that Sikes said that “We believe in trade. About 25% of the world’s food crosses borders today. That needs to continue to happen.”

It still can. But it will likely be more expensive at a time of already high inflation after an ongoing tariff threat by President Donald Trump was confirmed on Monday.

After a month delay, Trump said that an additional 10% tariff on goods from China, as well as 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, will go into effect on Tuesday.

Those three countries — two of them friendly neighboring nations — happen to be Minnesota’s largest agricultural export markets, according to department data.

If (or more likely when) Beijing, Mexico City and Ottawa reply in kind to Washington, Minnesota’s agricultural exports will likely become more expensive and thus less competitive on the world market.

“The one thing we know from the previous tariff war is these things have long tails,” said Michael Boland, a University of Minnesota professor of agricultural economics. If tariffs are reciprocal or a close equivalent, costs to consumers will rise on an array of goods, Boland said.

Especially since the three countries comprised 43% of all U.S. imports in 2023, according to the Washington Post.

Costs could rise on automobiles, in just one example. “A 25% tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said in February.

And what goes into Fords and other vehicles could jump at the pump, too: Much of Canada’s $63 billion trade surplus with the U.S., according to a New York Times analysis, is from oil and gas exports.

Back on the farm, fertilizer could be significantly impacted too. About 80% of potash, a key ingredient, comes from Canada, according to the Times.

“We’ve spent years sending all these trade missions to all these other countries talking about the value of our crops,” said Boland. If the U.S. is viewed as unreliable, he continued, “it takes a while for all those markets to come back.

“And they may never fully come back.”

Sikes stated that the U.S. had about half of China’s soybean market before tariffs were imposed during the first Trump administration and that it’s now down to about 30%.

Boland stressed that “You just want to make sure you’ve thought everything through. Because once you declare a [trade war] on somebody, it’s hard to go back and take that back, and you’ve got these long-term consequences.”

Cargill, according to Sikes, thinks in the long term with models that go out decades. Among many headwinds are issues around water, land-use policy, climate change, labor and immigration issues and trade policy.

It seems unlikely that the administration was as rigorous in its long-term analysis, which is unfortunate, because the impact of its actions on the global economy, let alone geopolitics, will be profound.

And as evidenced by Minnesota’s exports in agriculture and several other sectors, the stakes for the state are too.