President Donald Trump appears to have upended an 85-year relationship between American farmers and the global exercise of American power. But that bond has been fraying since the end of the Cold War, and Trump’s moves are just another big step.
During World War II, the U.S. government tied agriculture to foreign policy by using taxpayer funds to purchase food from American farmers and send it to hungry allies abroad. This agricultural diplomacy continued during the Cold War through programs such as the Marshall Plan to rebuild European agriculture, Food for Peace to send surplus American food to starving allies, and the United States Agency for International Development, which sought to make food aid and agricultural development permanent components of American foreign policy.
During that period, the United States also participated in multinational partnerships to establish global production goals and trade guidelines to promote the international movement of food, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Wheat Agreement, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
When American farmers faced labor shortages, the federal government created guest worker programs that provided key hands in the fields, typically from Mexico and the Caribbean.
At the end of World War II, the US government recognized that farmers could not rely solely on domestic agricultural subsidies, including production limits, price supports, and crop insurance, for prosperity. The well-being of American farmers depended, instead, on the rest of the world.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. His administration has also aggressively detained and deported suspected noncitizens living and working in the United States, including agricultural workers. And it has imposed tariffs that have caused American trading partners to respond, sharply reducing international demand for American agricultural products.
Trump’s actions follow diplomatic and agricultural transformations that I research, which began with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Feed the world, save the farm
Even before the nation’s founding, farmers in what would become the United States staked their livelihoods on international networks of labor, plants and animals, and trade.
Cotton was the most prominent early example of these relationships, and by the 19th century wheat farmers depended on expanding transportation networks to transport their products within the country and abroad.
But fears that international trade could create economic uncertainty limited American farmers’ interest in foreign markets. The Great Depression in the 1930s reinforced skepticism toward international markets, which many farmers and policymakers considered the main cause of the economic recession.
The Second World War forced them to change their minds. The Lend-Lease Act, passed in March 1941, was intended to keep the United States out of the war by providing supplies, weapons, and equipment to Britain and its allies. The important thing for farmers is that the law generated an increase in demand for food.
And following Congress’ declaration of war in December 1941, the need to feed American and allied troops abroad further increased demand for agricultural products. Food took on meaning beyond satisfying a wartime need: the Soviet Union, for example, made special requests for butter. American soldiers wrote about the special bond created by seeing milk and eggs from a local dairy, and Europeans receiving food under the Lend-Lease Act hugged large cans of condensed milk with sky blue labels as if they were talismans.
You may be interested in: Trump’s Justice Department reports ‘substantial progress’ in reviewing Epstein files, but still won’t say when they will be released
Another war ends
But despite their critical contribution to the war, American farmers feared that the usual pattern of postwar recession would repeat itself once Germany and Japan had surrendered.
Congress satisfied farmers’ fears of economic collapse by sharply reducing their food purchases as soon as the war ended in the summer of 1945. In 1946, Congress responded weakly to growing food needs abroad.
Further action waited until 1948, when Congress recognized the growing appeal of communism in Europe amid a poorly funded postwar reconstruction effort. The Marshall Plan’s most compelling promise of food and other resources was intended to counter Soviet influence.
Shipping American food abroad through postwar rehabilitation and development programs caused farm incomes to skyrocket. He demonstrated that foreign markets could create prosperity for American farmers, while the importance of food and agriculture to postwar reconstruction in Europe and Asia cemented his relevance in American foreign policy.
Farmers in the modern world
Farmers’ contribution to the Cold War reinforced their cultural and political importance in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing United States. The Midwestern farm became an aspirational symbol used by the State Department to encourage European refugees to immigrate to the United States after World War II.
American farmers volunteered to be amateur diplomats, sharing methods and technologies with their agricultural counterparts around the world.
By the 1950s, delegations of Soviet officials were traveling to the Midwest, including Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s excursion to Iowa in 1959. American farmers reciprocated with tours of the Soviet Union. Young Americans who had grown up on farms moved abroad to live with host families, working on their properties and informally sharing American farming methods. Convinced that their lands and techniques were superior to those of their foreign peers, American farmers felt compelled to share their wisdom with the rest of the world.
The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined the central purpose of US agricultural diplomacy. But the growing global appetite for meat in the 1990s helped make up some of the difference.
American farmers shifted crops from wheat to corn and soybeans to feed growing numbers of livestock around the world. They used newly available genetically modified seeds that promised unprecedented yields.
Expecting these transformations to benefit American farmers economically and seeing little need to preserve Cold War-era international cooperation, the U.S. government shifted its trade policy from collaborating in global trade to turning it into competition.
The George HW Bush and Clinton administrations crafted the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization to replace the comprehensive agreement on trade and tariffs. They assumed that the past preeminence of American farmers would continue to increase farm incomes even as global economic forces changed.
But American farmers have faced higher costs for seeds and fertilizers, as well as new international competitors like Brazil. With a diminished competitive advantage and the loss of Cold War cooperative infrastructure, American farmers now face a more volatile global market that will likely require greater government support through subsidies rather than delivering prosperity through trade.
That includes the Trump administration’s December 2025 announcement of a $12 billion bailout for farmers. As Trump’s trade wars continue, they show that the US government is no longer fostering a global agricultural market in which American farmers enjoy a trade advantage or government protection, even as they retain some cultural and political importance in the 21st century.
*Peter Simons is Professor of History at Hamilton College.
This article was originally published on The Conversation/Reuters
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and don’t miss our content
