President-elect Donald Trump acknowledges that lowering grocery prices may be difficult, despite making it a key plank of his presidential campaign.
In an interview with Time magazine, which named him Person of the Year for 2024, Trump said he nevertheless believes this will happen through lower energy costs and improvements in the supply chain.
Asked whether his presidency would be a “failure” if food prices did not fall, Trump said this would not be the case, while blaming the Biden administration for the way it handled inflation that primarily led to higher food prices.
“Look, they brought them up. I’d like to take them down. It’s hard to take things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very difficult,” he said in the interview published Thursday.
‘But I think so. I think energy will bring them down. I think a better supply chain will bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken,” Trump said.
Trump has promised to further increase American energy production. It is already at a record high.
He also did not specify how he would resolve any supply chain issues, focusing instead on complaints about the Biden administration’s incentives for electric vehicles.
In fact, experts say Trump’s much-discussed tariff proposals would likely worsen supply chain problems. It happened during Trump’s first administration, when market rates for shipping containers rose more than 70% in 2018 after he announced new tariffs, according to Reuters.
“Trump’s tariffs are repeating history and will cause a spike in shipping container shipping markets – with consumers picking up the cost,” Peter Sand, chief analyst at shipping pricing platform Xeneta, told Reuters in September.
Indeed, food prices have soared since the start of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020, rising a total of 23% over that period, much of which has coincided with President Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House.
However, the rate of price growth has slowed dramatically over the past year and is now less than 2%. A host of factors are responsible for the slowdown, including exactly the one Trump is counting on: At around $3 a gallon, gasoline prices have returned to multi-year lows and could fall further after an OPEC announcement this week that it lowers forecasts for global oil demand.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, increases in agricultural import prices have also moderated this year, while shipping costs for containers have fallen since rising over the summer, Xeneta said.
Yet food price growth is notoriously volatile and many factors that determine costs are often beyond government control. For example, egg prices are rising again, mainly due to rising demand and reduced supply due to bird flu.
Yet another of Trump’s proposals would likely lead to additional upward pressure on food costs: deportations. Asked by Time reporters about the issue, Trump again objected, stating that he would still allow some migrants to enter legally, but not those from “prisons.”
In fact, most farmworkers, even if they are undocumented, can still obtain a work permit once they enter the United States. Crop owners are taking no chances and are warning of the impact on food prices if the labor pool shrinks.
“If we have a labor shortage and we can’t get our crops picked and taken to market, it could impact grocery store shelves,” Joe Del Bosque, CEO of Del Bosque Farms in central California, told NBC News Los Angeles. last month. “There could be fewer fruits and vegetables in the produce area and this could drive up prices.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
