The pushback continues in Washington, D.C., against President Donald Trump’s plan to import beef from Argentina as a way to lower the price of beef in the U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi said they’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback.
“Oh, my goodness, have we a gotten reaction? I saw Markwayne Mullen (of Oklahoma) this morning. He said, ‘My phone has been ringing since 4 am. I am hearing from people that I’ve never heard from in years, and some that I’ve never heard from before at all.’ I know what the President’s intentions were. His intentions were the mother who’s pushing that shopping cart, going down that aisle trying to feed her family, and he thinks we’ve got to bring beef prices down for that mother. He has had a lot of schooling since he made that statement, and a lot of information given to him, and education that this is a global market. Let me explain how this works. And I know that he was kind of comparing this to the eggs when they were so high when he got in the office.”
She said the beef and egg prices are two entirely different situations.
“You can’t replace an egg with anything else. You eat the egg. It goes in cakes. It goes in pies. It goes in bread. You know, you can’t replace that with anything else. And I understand, you know, and of course, the high-path avian influenza played a factor in that, and I understand we’ve got some concern about that again in a few countries right now. But just getting him to the point of we know what you’re trying to do, but this market needs to be a true market, without any intervention from the government. And there are other choices, unlike eggs.”
The high price of beef will sort itself out if the President lets the market work.
“I mean, if the price of beef, because of the shortage that we’re looking at right now, because of all the circumstances of what created that shortage, but you have other proteins. You can do fish, chicken, lamb, pork, turkey, you name it. You have other choices there, so let the market be the market.”