US President Donald Trump and US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced up to an additional $14 billion for agricultural producers who continue to face COVID-19-induced market disruptions.

Signup for the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP 2) is scheduled to start from September 21st and run through December 11, 2020.

“America’s agriculture communities are resilient, but still face many challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump is once again demonstrating his commitment to ensure America’s farmers and ranchers remain in business to produce the food, fuel, and fiber America needs to thrive,” said Secretary Perdue.

Farmers from the U.S. Southeast, mainly those cultivating crops like cotton or sorghum, got larger trade aid payments from the government in 2019, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office said.

Notably, the Trump administration rolled out several subsidy schemes to compensate growers for lost sales during the tariff war with China.

Although many farmers support the US Presidential, dissatisfaction from farmers in states like Wisconsin or Michigan might play a big role in upcoming presidential election.

In the latest update of inspection methods in five decades, the Donald Trump administration has announced to stop requiring U.S. plants that produce egg products to have full-time government inspectors.

Under the new rule, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will allow companies to use different food-safety procedures designed for their factories and equipment.

Now, inspectors would visit plants once per shift, instead of being there whenever egg products are being processed.

The US administration is mulling a ban on some or all products made with cotton from the Xinjiang region, an autonomous territory in northwest China, over alleged human rights violations.

The potential ban comes amid reports of the use of forced labour on minority Muslims in the autonomous region, the New York Times reported.

China is one of the leading cotton producers globally and most of its crop is grown in Xinjiang. Human rights groups say the region’s Uighur minority are being persecuted and recruited for forced labour.

Worth mentioning here is that the US lawmakers had proposed a legislation in March also to prevent goods made in Xinjiang region from reaching the US.