President Donald Trump is pledging to use tariff revenue to bail out farmers reeling from the impact of the ongoing trade war.
“We’re going to take some of that tariff money that we made, we’re going to give it to our farmers, who are, for a little while, going to be hurt until the tariffs kick into their benefit,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “So we’re going to make sure that our farmers are in great shape, because we’re taking in a lot of money.”
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment about details regarding the bailout.
Trump’s previous actions to bail out farmers have seen mixed success. Many of the problems plaguing U.S. farmers today are a redux of the issues that arose in the president’s first term.
“The takeaway that we have from the data of the last time we did this is that the U.S. lost about 20% of our market share, and it never came back,” Todd Main, the director of market development at the Illinois Soybean Association, told Fortune.
According to Wendong Zhang, an associate professor of applied economics and policy at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business, financial support for farmers today would have similar consequences.
“It will compensate for the immediate economic losses due to tariffs, but it doesn’t necessarily improve the long-term competitiveness of agriculture on the global stage,” Zhang told Fortune.
“We can grow anything. What we really want is good relations with our trading partners,” Illinois Soybean Association’s Main said. “We want markets. We don’t want bailouts.”
