Australian Agricultural Company (ASX:AAC), an ASX-listed company that exports beef to the US, was hit -2.5% on Thursday morning trades – but compared to other stocks, that maybe wasn’t too bad.

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This comes even as the stock, relatively illiquid compared to other fallers on Thursday like Cettire, saw volumes double compared to its rolling four-week average.

(For those playing at home: 355K shares vs 124.3K shares respectively.) The reason AAC is being hit by sellers on Thursday? Another tariff play.

The company did not specifically provide a breakdown of sales by export destination in its latest half-yearly, but global meat sales (Wagyu) were up 14% vs pcp.

Worth considering in light of a somewhat soft sell-off: Wagyu beef revenue in the six months to September 30, 2024, stood at $147.9M, and not all of that goes to the U.S. But it was by far the company’s biggest money maker.

The whole justification for Trump’s 10% blanket tariff on Australia appears to be a relatively minor dispute surrounding beef import controls. Australia won’t allow the U.S. to export beef here, more or less, because of mad cow disease. Fair enough.

Even though Trump earlier this year was more focused on surpluses and deficits – and Australia is on the good side of that binary in Trump’s eyes – this week, a U.S. gov’t trade report outlined a specific grievance around beef.

Perhaps amusingly, much Australian beef exported to the US goes into McDonald’s burgers. This could perhaps be why this issue is close to Trump’s heart.

It is, on the whole, somewhat ridiculous – or it appears so in my view – that the White House would be so concerned about beef and chicken exports to Australia to such extent as to place a 10% tariff on all Oz exports.

There are, after all, wars on elsewhere in the world right now.

The National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) issued a statement this morning outlining its “profound disappointment” with Trump’s tariff decision.

This kind of tit-for-tat trade manoeuvring ultimately appears to be more about entertaining MAGA die-hards whose collective understanding of modern economics generally appears fragile, and, tapping into a vague kind of passion for something approximating American independence.

For now, the 10% tariffs aren’t as bad as the 25% tariffs floated into the marketplace of ideas early into Trump 2.0, so for now, the sell-off for AAC hasn’t been as intense.

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Still — another victim of the United States’s renewed passion for global firestoking. Along with the entire ASX today.

AAC last traded at $1.38 through Thursday morning.

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