Dean & Deluca are hurting the economy

According to the Wall Street Journal, surging food imports are exacerbating the trade deficit.

Money quote:

Agriculture, one of the few big sectors of the economy that could be counted on to produce trade surpluses, has recently generated monthly deficits -- a development that could worsen the nation's already significant trade imbalance....

But the problem with the widening overall trade deficit is that it is sustainable only as long as foreigners are willing to lend the U.S. large amounts of money. Many economists warn that this isn't likely to continue, and if they're correct, the risks are growing for a market-rattling crash in the value of the dollar....

The overall trade deficit widened to $54 billion in August, the most recent monthly figure available. That was the second-biggest gap on record after June's $55 billion.

During the 1990s, the agriculture sector's ability to single-handedly cut the trade deficit by as much as 16% some years gave it political capital in Washington, helping justify billions of dollars in annual farm subsidies. Now, agriculture's shrinking impact on the trade scene, plus the swelling federal budget deficit, could make it harder for the farm lobby to protect those subsidies.

The U.S. is still the world's biggest agricultural exporter. But the agricultural-trade surplus is evaporating so quickly that some economists in the Bush administration are quietly speculating that the sector might generate an annual trade deficit as soon as the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2005. That would be the first since 1959, when postwar Europe re-emerged as a major farm power.