I voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and most recently, this past November. I am a fan of his economic policies as well as his position on immigration and his overall strategy behind “Making America Great Again.” Nevertheless, I would like to offer caution to President-elect Trump regarding his trade policies, specifically import tariffs aimed at China.
When aspiring 2012 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump weighed in with his threat to slap a 25% import duty on all Chinese manufactured goods, stating “that’s going to do a number of things,” I wondered if he understood China’s ubiquity in the domestic beef, pork and poultry industry, and what such a tax could do to the price of a meal for every family in the U.S.
Here we are some 12 years later and President-elect Trump is rattling an even larger version of the same saber, only this time, as noted by the financial magazine Barron’s, “He has proposed an across-the-board 60% tariff on all Chinese imports — a massive and historic increase.”
The animal health industry in the U.S. relies heavily, and in some cases exclusively, on Chinese manufactured active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used to manufacture the finished products that keep America’s livestock healthy and disease free.
Prior to my current position in academia, I was the CEO of a company that represented almost two-dozen Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers for the import and sale of their products into the U.S. The majority of the products we sold were antibiotics used to treat livestock; pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys and cattle, that were subsequently slaughtered, butchered and ended up on Americans’ tables for supper.
Sorry to be the one to have to ruin your day, but when you buy your child one of those meals in a bag that comes with a toy from a drive-through fast food chain, it’s not just the little toy that comes with it that was “Made in China.”
The chickens from which those nuggets were produced probably consumed a Chinese manufactured tetracycline or a sulfa drug during their short life of less than two months — the time it takes to go from an egg to a broiler.
If you opted for the burger-in-the-bag meal, the meat in that hamburger was probably from an old cow, way beyond her prime to produce milk, and she’d been feed Chinese-manufactured antibiotics to keep her healthy until about 60 days before her head met the mallet at the slaughterhouse.
To feed the almost 300 million or so meat eaters across the U.S., we rely on a livestock industry that raises animals in close quarters, under conditions that often cause disease to spread, hence the need for antibiotics and other anti-infective treatments.
For decades, Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers have been producing low-cost antibiotics — most of which have not been produced in the U.S. for a long time. China relies on massive fermentation capacity, allowing its pharmaceutical industry to manufacture APIs inexpensively. No U.S. manufacturer is willing to make such an investment to produce these relatively inexpensive, older products when instead it can invest in research and development of newer, cutting-edge drug therapies.
Multinational animal health corporations purchase hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tons of Chinese manufactured antibiotics annually, incorporating these raw materials into finished dosage formulations that are routinely administered to livestock either in their feed, their water, as boluses (large tablets) or by injection.
All this activity goes on under the watchful eyes of the Food and Drug Administration — both the Chinese manufacturers and the domestic producers that purchase their products have a heavy load of regulatory compliance they must follow, including the routine inspection of manufacturing sites.
So in case China calls Trump’s tariff bluff, he should rethink about the impact of a 60% tariff on Chinese manufactured antibiotics and what such a price increase could do to the price of a good steak at a fine restaurant, to a bag of chicken fingers or a burger at one of those fast-food chains where we take our children, to the price of an Italian sub at the corner delicatessen, to one of those garlic-laced dirty-water hot dogs sold on the street, to those bacon and ham omelets we wash down with countless cups of coffee at breakfast in diners located in small towns and cities across the country and to America’s dinner tables, where it’s already a challenge to feed a family during difficult economic times.
Gregory J. Rummo is a lecturer of chemistry at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach and the former CEO of New Chemic (US) Inc. located in Montvale, New Jersey, where he is still a consultant, minority owner and one of the company’s four directors.
Source: Sun-sentinel.com – Opinion
