OMAHA, Neb (KMTV) — President Trump’s order to freeze all federal spending has sent shock waves through programs utilizing federal funding and sent non-profits and NGO’s scrambling for support.
But in the Agriculture Industry the new instability isn’t totally out of left field.
“Everytime there is a change in administration there are going to be reviews of programs, maybe some pauses to programs and changes to programs. It wasn’t unexpected that some of these things might happen,” said Royce Schaneman, a wheat farmer and the Executive Director of Nebraska’s Wheat Board.
Farmers aren’t federal employees but they do play a big role in some of the federal programs Trump is taking aim at, particularly in the US Agency for International Development or USAID.
Some of those programs, including Food for Peace, purchase around 2 billion of dollars in US commodities like grain to help communities across the globe.
That means not only are folks getting fed, our farmers are getting paid.
“Be it feeding populations at a refugee camp where there might be longer term needs but also working to respond to disasters as they might arise,” said Jake Westlin, Vice President of Policy at the National Association of Wheat Growers.
But with a freeze on federal spending came a freeze on purchases for those programs leaving millions of dollars in wheat in limbo.
“I think we saw just over 200,000 tons of metric wheat that is valued at $65 million dollars that was paused from being purchased,” said Westlin.
New on Tuesday though, things are starting to look up for producers.
Over the weekend Trump removed the pause on the purchase of the 200,000 tons of wheat and Republicans in congress are hoping a new home for these food aid programs can keep them off the Trump administration’s radar.
“There is legislation being introduced today to help move some of the Food for Peace title 2 from USAID to USDA because we know there has been a lot of challenges to working with USAID over the years,” said Westlin.
For Royce resuming the Food Aid programs isn’t just beneficial in the short term for farmers.
Once these developing economies are back on track they will want to buy grain from someone and Royce hopes helping now means they will make purchases with us in the future instead of our competitors.
“With that assistance and having experience with our commodities in the US, they would look to the US as a reliable supplier of high quality products,” said Schaneman.
