President Joe Biden toured an Illinois farm Wednesday to call for new investments and agricultural policies that he said would help blunt the impact of inflation amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
‘You’re like the backbone of freedom,’ Biden told a crowd of about 100 farmers and other supporters in Kankakee as he touted his plans to boost domestic food production.
Speaking just hours after new data showed the price of groceries in the US jumped 10.8 percent in the past year, the most since 1980, Biden repeatedly tied soaring inflation to the war in Ukraine.
‘Right now America’s fighting on two fronts: At home it’s inflation and rising prices. Abroad it’s helping Ukrainians defend their democracy and feeding those hungry around the world,’ said Biden.
Biden spoke soon after the latest inflation report showed that consumer prices jumped 8.3 percent in April from a year ago — down slightly from the prior month’s rate but still near a four-decade high.
The report showed that US food prices are rising at a dizzying pace, with the index for all food up 9.4 percent from last year, the largest 12-month increase since 1981.
‘Putin’s war has cut off crucial sources of food,’ Biden said. He pointed to 20 million tons of grain stuck in Ukrainian silos.
Ukraine and Russia are both top grain exporters.
Guess what? Those tons don’t get to market an awful lot of people in Africa are going to starve to death,’ said Biden.
He also brought up a global shortage in fertilizer also tied to the war.
He met with farmers Jeff O’Connor, who pushed for programs that would expand federal loan programs for farmers who ‘double plant’ as among other holes in the system.
‘Pretty damn big holes,’ Biden said.
He touted the infrastructure law, which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who traveled with him from Washington, said would trim export costs for farmers.
‘We have no farmers in our family,’ Biden told O’Connor, who showed the president his young wheat fields.
O’Connor asked the president how he thought the wheat was doing. It looks ‘pretty healthy to me. How do you feel about it?’ Biden asked.
It turns out it was a bit ‘behind’ for maturity.
Biden wore shirtsleeves as he toured the farm and spoke to supporters about agriculture.
He noted that two Illinois senators, Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, weren’t in attendance because ‘there’s a vote today in the United States Senate and they’re unable to be here.’
But he didn’t mention the topic of the Senate vote, which regards codifying legal protections for abortion in federal law, as the Supreme Court prepares to strike down Roe v Wade.
Biden told farmers ‘you feed the world, and we’re seeing with Putin’s war in Ukraine, you’re like the backbone of freedom.’
He called American farmers the ‘breadbasket of democracy’ and included a few digs the cosmopolitan set.
’Every investment banker can leave their job and [if] every farmer left we’d all starve to death,’ said Biden, who was also scheduled to appear at a fundraiser in Chicago later on Wednesday.
He also talked up his own career tending to rural interests in his home state of Delaware.
‘We have more chickens than there are Americans. More boilers,’ Biden said, speaking of the output of the Delmarva Peninsula that includes Maryland and Virginia.
‘Let me put it this way. If I didn’t know something about farms, I’d have been a United States senator for six years, not 36 years,’ he said.