Two prominent Democrats in the Senate are questioning how meatpacking companies could justify exporting record amounts to China in April while warning of a shortage of pork and beef across the United States.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey sent a letter late Monday to the chief executives of Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill and JBS, criticizing them for exporting to China at the same time they were lobbying the Trump administration to keep their plants open during the pandemic because they wanted to keep feeding Americans.
The senators said the companies were putting their workers' lives in danger while also raising food prices for American consumers.
"This pattern of behavior raises questions about whether you are living up to your commitments to the workers who produce your pork and beef, the communities in which you operate and the nation's consumers that rely on your products to feed their families," Warren and Booker wrote.
The letter was prompted by an article in The New York Times last week detailing how pork exports to China totaled a record 129,000 tons in April, when the profitable demand in that country surged.
Representatives for Tyson and Cargill declined to comment on the letter. Smithfield, which is owned by a Chinese company, and JBS did not return requests for comment.
The meat companies have said shortages across the United States were a legitimate concern. Dozens of their plants were forced to close through April and into May, as thousands of workers tested positive for the coronavirus, and dozens died.
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The companies said much of the exported meat had been produced weeks before it was shipped to China and before packing plants became hot spots for the virus. Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late April to keep the plants operating, some of the large meat companies have switched their production to better meet domestic demand, they said.
Data shows meat exports continued to surge in May. Exports of poultry increased 28% from a year earlier, according to Panjiva, the supply-chain research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. And pork exports to China rose 590% from a year earlier, reaching their highest level since at least 2009. JBS accounted for half of those shipments, according to Panjiva.
MIXED SIGNALS
Separately, Trump took to Twitter late Monday to dispute a statement by one of his aides hours earlier as White House officials struggled to convey a consistent China strategy.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a strong China critic, said in a Fox Business interview Monday evening that the trade deal Trump signed with Beijing in January was "over."
The comments triggered a sell-off in stock futures, an index the president watches closely.
Shortly after 10 p.m., Trump tweeted that "The China Trade Deal is fully intact. Hopefully they will continue to live up to the terms of the Agreement!"
As part of Navarro's Fox Business interview, he also alleged without offering any evidence that China had sent hundreds of thousands of people "to spread that virus" in the U.S."
"It's over, yes," Navarro said when asked about the status of the trade deal during that interview.
Navarro has a special status in the White House; he often goes on television shows and says what he likes, discarding administration talking points. His comments on Monday, however, clearly upset other White House officials and prompted a swift rebuttal.
Soon after Navarro made his comments, White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told The Washington Post that "The China trade deal is still intact."
A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss internal matters, said Navarro was not speaking for the administration when he made the comments about the deal being over.
NAVARRO RESPONDS
Navarro later told Reuters that his comments had been "wildly" taken out of context and did not pertain to the trade deal with China.
"They had nothing at all to do with the Phase 1 trade deal, which continues in place. I was simply speaking to the lack of trust we now have of the Chinese Communist Party after they lied about the origins of the China virus and foisted a pandemic upon the world," Navarro said.
The mixed signals from the White House come as factions within the administration jockey over how the U.S. should respond to China's role in the pandemic. Navarro has blamed Beijing for allowing its representatives to visit the U.S. in January, when the coronavirus was beginning to spread rapidly across China. He told Fox Business that the moment amounted to a "turning point" in relations between the superpowers.
The president repeatedly has cited the trade deal as one of the top economic policy accomplishments of his administration, and other senior advisers have urged a more cautious approach. But Trump appears to have soured on the trade deal recently, and last week he wrote on Twitter that the option of a "complete decoupling" between the U.S. and China was on the table.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Corkery of The New York Times and by Josh Dawsey and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post.