Shortly after Chinese officials pledged to buy $200 billion worth of United States goods as part of a trade agreement signed between the two countries in January, quarantines began in an effort to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
“What you've seen in the agriculture market is there, there was a lot of excitement coming out of the trade agreement with China for approximately a month ago,” said Brandon Willis. “Not long after that. You saw the coronavirus in the news. And because of that you saw tempering in the markets, not really a huge drop, but a little drop. What you're really seeing, I think is, is nobody knows what's going to happen. And so you're seeing small drops in the market that I think certainly could, could go upward and as soon as some positive news comes out”
Brandon Willis is an applied economics assistant professor at Utah State University.
“If you look at a snapshot today, we're down a little bit, we're down. But I think that get recovered. Dairy's, obviously a big export,” said Willis. “You've seen the dairy futures are down probably three to 4%. That doesn't mean they're taking a hit today. It just means that there's a tempering of the of the optimism, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight months out.”
So, do we need to start worrying on our agricultural markets?
According to Sarah Dorland with Ceres Dairy Risk Management, we shouldn’t expect Utah’s market to be individually affected by this outbreak.
“If we do start to see an impact to the overall US and our export ability, then we would expect to see Utah will move just with everybody else,” said Dorland
This year, the United States’ goal is to reach $35 billion in agriculture exports to China.
