© 2024 KMUW
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Changes To US Trade Policy With China Could Impact Kansas

Nicola Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
Magazines at a Beijing newsstand show images of President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders are meeting at Mar-a-Lago Thursday and Friday.

Trade policies are on the agenda for President Trump’s two-day summit with the Chinese president. Trade experts say renegotiating existing trade agreements could affect Kansas.

The latest numbers from the Kansas Department of Commerce show that Kansas companies export more than $10 billion dollars worth of goods.

About half of the exports went to just three countries: Canada, Mexico and China. The state had foreign trade worth nearly $1 billion with China in 2015.

Credit Deborah Shaar / KMUW
/
KMUW

Karyn Page, president of the Wichita-based Kansas Global Trade Services, says having a trade agreement with other countries levels the playing field by standardizing rules and processes.

"That’s one of the beautiful things about a trade agreement is it just puts all the rules and people all agree to the same rules," Page says. "And when you take those away or when you start changing them, then for companies, that makes it even more difficult."

The trade deficit with China (the difference between U.S. exports to China and U.S. imports from China) was $347 billion in 2016.

Overall, Kansas companies sold goods to about 200 countries in recent years.

The top five exported commodities in Kansas are aircraft and aircraft parts, meat, cereals, industrial machinery and electrical machinery.

The Department of Commerce says even though exports declined in 2015, Kansas still had the top export performance in the five-state region, which includes Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Page says the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, set the standards for U.S. trade policy decades ago and it’s been considered the standard for other nations as well.

Page says NAFTA has been an effective tool that companies have used for decades.

“I don’t like the idea of the Trump administration saying, 'We’re just going to get rid of it before we figure out another solution,'" she says. "I’m not a fan of taking strong action like that without a backup. I would rather we have a backup for the companies because when you give them uncertainty, and they don’t understand what they have to do next, what they will do is not do anything, which would be terrible for the U.S. economy and for the Kansas economy."

--

Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar

 
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.