President Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to announce April tariffs on all imported food, framing the move as a boon to U.S. farmers who will produce even more product for domestic consumption. But the MAGA movement is revealing a gap in its economic logic, and it will cost U.S. consumers and producers dearly.

Consider the video posted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., wherein the “Make America Healthy Again” leader pledged to work in coordination with the Department of Agriculture to ban all agricultural chemicals and pesticides used for farming if they’d been restricted overseas.

Americans love to cite Europe for policy experiments, but not everything that happens on the old continent should be treated as secret knowledge which Americans lack.

As a journalist covering European agriculture, I witnessed the sharp decline of farm profitability in the European Union…

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This fully coincides with Europe’s hesitancy to adopt modern technology, including crop protection chemicals and genetic engineering, which remains illegal in the EU.

America has made itself great by basing its food production system on innovation and a light regulatory touch. We need to stay grounded in the basics, and that means recognizing that feeding millions of people is about scalability, accessibility and price.

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