Hello again, everyone, and welcome once again to Arkansas Week.

Can, in fact, the treatment be worse than the cure?

That's ultimately for the patient to decide, of course, but without question, treatment can be devastatingly painful, especially if the ailment is cancer.

In a moment, the research being done on Arkansas right here to alleviate that pain.

First, the economy, Arkansas and the nation's.

The farm outlook here and elsewhere remains grim, and there's growing nervousness about the equity markets.

The sustained uncertainty stems in no small measure from the tariff wars that have altered the global economy and all its components technical, heavy manufacturing and agriculture.

Surveying the situation in the Delta this week, state AG Secretary Wes Ward cited the trade war as a principal problem, especially on the row crop industry.

Incredibly important for Arkansas agriculture, but looking at potentially up to a $1.5 billion economic loss for our row crop industry this year.

And so hearing a lot from producers on on what we can do to help there.

And, you know, a lot of that's the just the cost of production is really high.

There's some issues with trade and, and markets for our agriculture commodities.

And so, we have been hearing from a lot of farmers, the governor's been hearing from a lot of farmers.

And that's again, part of part of what this tour is about is, harvesting firsthand directly on the farm with producers and talking about issues and challenges and fun ways to be helpful.

AG Secretary Wes Ward.

So now where from here?

Where are we now?

Joined by a couple of old friends, Doctor Mervin Rob from the University of Arkansas Economic Research Department, and Doctor Michael Park from the UOL Business and Economic Research Center.

Gentlemen, thank you for coming in.

Mervin, we'll begin with you.

We, the agriculture sector, would seem to be taking it on the chin, not just in Arkansas, but especially in Arkansas.

And there's very little sign of relief.

Or am I wrong?

Well, I mean, I think we've had a rough couple of years for agriculture here in the state of Arkansas.

Last year we had record yields, which sounds like it's a good thing, except when you have so much supply, both here in Arkansas, around the nation and internationally as well.

That depresses, prices.

Farmers are able to receive for their crops.

So last year, they were able to store some of their crops to be able to sell this year.

This year, they find, all kinds of other issues increasing input prices and most importantly, a loss of corn markets for their crops.

So, yes, I think, AG in Arkansas has had a rough couple of years.

This year seems worse somehow than last year as well.

Yeah.

The trade situation though is that to what extent this seems to largely a self-inflicted wound, right or wrong.

Well, I mean, I think, given that a very large customer of ours was China, not replacing that with another customer.

In the short term, is a huge challenge for the farm industry here.

You know, there are ways to mitigate a lot of that requires using some of the money collected by the federal government to pay off the farmers for the losses that they're seeing.

But, yes, in the short term, if we don't have another market, which we currently don't, because we have sort of a trade war with many countries around the world, farmers are likely to take it on the chin this year as well.

Michael, you see any any light at the end of the tunnel?

Well, no near-term anyway.

And not necessarily in the near term.

I mean, the, the plight of our Arkansas crop farmers has been pretty well documented.

It's a classic, cost squeeze where, inflation increased the cost of all the inputs and, commodity prices, the the price the farmers receive for their product has been very low.

And so, there's it's very difficult to for a farmer to envision making a profit off of, you know, this year's cycle, you know, and it's, it's you suggested the idea that it's self-inflicted in the sense that it's part of the overall tariff war.

But in a sense, it's a secondary part of the tariff war.

It's not caused by the tariffs that we have imposed on other countries, but rather the retaliation.

And that's, you know, just as bad, if not more immediately pressing, than the effects of the tariffs, which are, currently working their way through the U.S.

supply chain.

So, you know, they, the overall the the the sense of, of uncertainty about what the tariff rate is going to be next week, let alone next year, is contributing to what I call it, the year of uncertainty.

That's, the name that I call in 2025 at this point.

And so the, the, the, the plight of Arkansas farmers, but particularly soybean farmers from whom China has bought no product at all this year.

And when they usually buy about one third of U.S.

output, you know, that's another factor of uncertainty.

Where are these soybeans going to go?

The world market is still out there.

The world price is suppressed.

So it's just a question of where it's all going to settle out.

Yeah.

And, a couple of other countries seem to be fulfilling most of our filling.

Most of that, market demand.

Anyway, what has quite concerned a couple of the folks that I've spoken with over the last couple of days is that they fear that the, the, our share of the market will have been permanently or for at least several years, diminished.

There certainly is that danger.

I mean, we saw after the, previous Trump administration's battle with trade, we suffered a similar experience.

And we saw that, Arkansas and Brazil, I mean, Argentina and Brazil were able to increase their productivity, increase their production levels, to fill that void that China was leaving with the U.S purchases.

And they've continued to maintain growth in their industries.

So, it's, it's a long term competition and factor.

Now, it's typically there's a difference in seasonality between South America and North America.

But the total volume is, growing in terms of supply because of the South American countries expanding their capacity.

Yeah.

Mervyn Gibran, can we get some of that market?

Can our farmers get some of that share back?

I think in the short term it's possible.

So, the president and the Chinese president are expected to meet here shortly.

It's not impossible to envision a short term increase in Chinese purchases to ameliorate some of the trade concerns.

But I think in the long term, we have to look for other markets because China has spent money, developing the ag markets in Brazil and Argentina.

So over the long term, they plan to move away from us purchases, be less dependent on us in the same way that, manufacturing here in the United States has invested in India and other Southeast Asian companies to try to be less dependent on China.

So, some of that retaliation is long term.

So again, in the in the short term, they might purchase some energy supplies from the US.

But I think in the long term they're trying to move away from this as well.

Well, on that note, exempting the I will stay with you, Mervyn, for a second, exempting the ag sector, particularly the row crop situation, given the Arkansas economic, posture right now would seem to be fairly stable.

Right?

Yeah.

In fact, we just received, an update from the Federal Reserve, the eighth district's page book, and they seem to think that the economy was fairly stable here in the state of Arkansas.

I think the one area of concern that they noted, and this is true nationally as well, is that middle income customers, consumers are pulling back, spending.

So a lot of the spending is currently driven by higher income, consumers, but middle income consumers whom we have a lot of in the state of Arkansas, are pulling back spending.

And that is something to keep an eye on.

Yeah, sort of a reduction in consumer spending over the last few weeks.

Michael.

Yes, we have seen that, I'm looking at the sales tax figures.

Yes.

They Treasury and I have a series of, retail sales that I extract from the, sales tax measures.

And we are seeing a significant slowdown in consumer spending, even more so than is apparent in the, retail sales data from the U.S.

Census Bureau.

But, as far as the, supply side of the, the economy, we've had some really big swings up and down in GDP.

We were number one in the second half of 2024 and then, number 50, in the last order.

And that's all driven by fluctuating foreign prices, farm incomes.

If you view through those statistics, they look at the year over year numbers.

Arkansas is growing right along with the U.S that 2% GDP growth, personal income growth is stronger.

Our employment growth is even stronger than the U.S, even after adjusting for expected downward revisions that we'll find out about in January.

So, we're in a fairly good situation for whatever comes our way.

But we won't escape any significant national downturn if one should emerge.

We're just, in a better position to deal with that than perhaps some other states.

And I might be at this point.

Let me throw this at both of you guys.

This was a comment that I picked up from an economist, I think, from the Atlantic Council situation right now is better than we had feared, but worse than what we need now.

I mean, well, yeah, better than what we feared in the sense that, you know, the sky hasn't fallen with all these tariffs.

One of the things is that, companies are looking for ways around the effects of the tariffs, and it's slowly working its way through the supply chain.

So we haven't seen any steep increases in consumer prices.

We haven't seen any severe bottlenecks, but they're building, firms were able to front run some of those tariffs and import goods before they took effect.

There's still some uncertainty about which tariffs are going to last and which are going to be changed as we go forward.

So most of the effort is in trying to minimize the impact of the tariffs.

And that's making their impact felt more slowly in the economy than we anticipated at first.

Yeah.

Go back to Murphy.

It was just like I had lunch last week with a with an Arkansas Tech executive.

In that mention of the tariffs, he put his head in his hands and he said it's not so much not only what is going on right now, we don't know what's going to go on next week, let alone next month.

And it makes planning, it almost impossible.

I mean, I think what we've seen in that sense, as you see business investment in just one sector, and that's the AI sector.

And outside of that, businesses largely pull back on investment because they have no certainty about what policy would be.

So I've seen businesses talk about various things that they might do, say to move, trade, you know, move their supply chains away from China.

They had picked other countries that they might have moved to, but some of those countries now have higher tariff rates than China as a whole.

Again, Chinese tariffs, are moving are rather volatile at this point as well.

But earlier this week, I heard an economist describe this as termites working their way beneath the surface here and there.

You see small, piles of sawdust that you haven't seen in a lot of the damage yet.

But I think sort of the restructure of the global economy in this sort of very arbitrary, unpredictable way, is going to have longer term impacts.

We just haven't seen those things just yet.

Yeah.

Let me point out that that, phrase from about 20 years ago, irrational exuberance, stock prices, I think all the indexes are at record highs.

Are you a bit nervous?

Should we be a bit nervous?

Mervyn?

I think given that the, stocks are being driven by one particular sector, I think the AI boom and the investments in data centers and things of that nature have some real, you know, economic reason behind them.

I can't say that all of the equity, markets based on those, have all real reasons.

But broadly, you know, companies are reporting fairly strong earnings, maybe not necessarily enough to justify the high level equities, but other equity markets have actually performed, better than the US.

So some European and Asian markets have done a lot better than the US.

So, it's always, a concern when you see, equities as high as they are.

In the US.

But maybe some of that is justified.

There's a little bit of froth.

Definitely.

Michael, the book of the hour would seem to be Mr.

Sorkin's entitled 1929.

He sees some parallels.

Do you?

Well, you know, you never see the crash coming until it happens, I suppose.

Yeah.

I think it's really difficult to evaluate the valuation of these tech companies.

Is based not on, plant and equipment and profitability.

Of their product, but on expectations of what they're capable of.

That's where the big value is, and it's hard to assess that.

So it's hard to say whether they're overvalued or not.

They certainly are bringing much of the rest of the market with them.

And, and I think, you know, so far as, as long as us companies are able to negotiate the uncertainties associated with our current situation, we're in a fairly stable situation until things go wrong.

And that's always the problem with.

Yeah, about a minute remaining in our time.

Obviously, Arkansas has had a series of tax cuts, income tax cuts and corporate income tax cuts to.

Does that make our situation?

I guess it obviously does a bit more dicey than it might otherwise.

Well, it might, but then on the other hand, we've had a string of large, budget surpluses that have, contributed to having a rainy day fund.

I don't think there's necessarily any danger, immediate danger of, the government reaching a fiscal crisis.

But, you know, what I'll try to look at is, is what the numbers say about the underlying economic circumstances.

And, well, we saw a one month decline in income tax receipts last month.

Withholdings were up.

And that's, an indication that, incomes are continuing to be maintained.

So it's probably special factors that caused that one month blip.

So consumer sales tax were up, income tax was, up for the quarter if you average over it.

So, I think things are in a fairly stable situation.

All right, gentlemen, Mervyn and Michael, thanks so much for being with us.

As always.

Come back soon.

We appreciate your insights and we'll be back in a moment.

And we are back every day.

Lives that would have been lost to cancer a few short years ago are being rescued.

Medical science has made enormous progress in preventing and combating, even curing cancer.

Treating the tumor, of course, will always take priority in any cancer protocol.

But what about the side effects of that treatment?

Radiation and chemotherapy can have uncomfortable, painful, even debilitating side effects.

Knowing which patients can tolerate how much modern cancer therapy can give the treatment team, not to mention the patient and invaluable Head Start.

Well, now, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has been awarded almost $6 million to research that prospect, and we are joined now, my doctor, Marianne Buruma of the UAMs Rockefeller Cancer Center, thank you so much for coming in.

It's such an honor to be here.

This is an aspect of medicine that has never been explored before, at least in a sustained clinical study context.

First in the nation.

That's correct.

Yes.

So this is not just any kind of study.

This work is part of a center.

It's called a center of biomedical research excellence that's supported by the National Institutes of Health.

And it's been in place actually, now for at least ten years.

So this, this grant that we've received now will move us forward for another five years.

And within the center, we actually do research in many different on many different types of side effects of cancer.

Think well, it is inter interdisciplinary as well.

I mean it's just too important to leave just the oncologists.

So maybe you want to I guess.

So, yes.

That one of the strengths of this no offense to them of course.

No no, no.

One of the strengths of these centers is that it's very collaborative and it's different disciplines, as you mentioned, that work together, oncologists, but also biologists, chemists and, that's what makes the whole the center as a whole so strong.

Right.

Well, are there some clues to, to to work from?

Yes, absolutely.

So some suggestions anyway from our from our existing experience in treatment.

Yes.

So what we what we do a lot is we, we start in the clinic and just observations from the clinic.

So a lot of physicians will tell us this is what we observe is what we see.

So we can work from there.

Then take that information, take it to what we call the bench and do actual more basic research sometimes also, then we findings that we find in in the lab on the bench, we take that back and see if we can see that or implemented back again in the, in the clinic.

And so this is how we going back and forth to find those individual clues that it has to be replicated on a sustained basis to be valid.

The research findings, yes, yes, absolutely needs to be replicated in the basic science, but then also clinically and, back and forth.

Yes, you're right.

It's it's a cliche, a grim one in this context.

It's the treatment is sometimes worse than the cure.

Alas, some patients eventually decide, yeah, that's true.

And they and they, they pull back from withdrawal from treatment.

This conceivably could eliminate that possible or at least mitigate them.

That's exactly what we're trying to do.

Yes.

It's make, cancer therapy safer so that during treatment we might even be more aggressive on the tumor at the same time, not, giving these patients some side effects and also some of the side effects of cancer therapy.

They show years after a patient has been treated or it's chronic.

And so the side effects remain for years.

And these we also try to understand and mitigate so that somebody who survives their cancer, their cancer treatment has improved quality of life in the long term.

So even though you are successful in alleviating or even reversing or curing the tumor of the cancer, so the side effects can like nausea or the hair loss looks common.

There's for instance, some cancer treatments, some, chemotherapy treatments.

Some radiation treatments can cause long term scarring in certain organs and tissues, and that can cause side effects and reduced function and pain, things like that.

That's one of the side effects that we're trying to understand and mitigate.

How or in the clinical setting, how will you go about doing this, doctor?

I mean, so a patient reports with cancer and during the treatment itself or in a pre treatment, protocol.

So there's many, many ways indeed in a treatment protocol we try to for instance with radiation therapy, really aim the radiation only to the tumor.

And not the, the normal, the healthy tissue around the tumor.

And in time, those radiation therapy treatments get better and better.

For instance, one of the big, things that has happened at M is the building of the proton cancer, radiation therapy center, that with proton radiation therapy, you can do that.

You can aim do radiation much better just at the tumor.

But Denver also looking at treatments co treatments that can be given either together with the cancer therapy or later on that are aimed at reducing dose side effects.

Yeah.

And so often in cancer treatment our alignment is given.

To understand there is a, a multifaceted approach to treating the malignancy.

There may be a combination of chemo and radiation.

So can you increase one and reduce the other, perhaps.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

And they often also work together.

So one, one some of the research that's being done is really try and understand how do these, those different treatments interact with each other to be good but also to it can also be bad and actually enhance side effects.

And of course we need to know that.

Yeah.

But and the bottom line is, is this is more than just, or entirely apart from a study of palliative care.

This is how to be more aggressive in treating the malignancy.

That's exactly yes.

Yes.

And improving the quality of life of those who survive cancer and the number of cancer survivors.

We know is increasing tremendously in this country.

In that context, doctor, we are making science is making progress in alleviating cancer or in in treating tumors.

Yes.

It is not the death sentence necessarily.

No no, no.

Yeah.

In many cases not anymore.

Luckily.

Are we any closer to understanding cancer.

Why some cells go bad and.

Oh yes.

Absolutely.

And it's actually we understand much better why cells go bad these days.

But the what we also find is that the human the body interacts a lot with these tumor cells.

For instance, our immune system tries to attack these cells.

These tumor cells can then try to prevent that protect themselves from our own immune system.

So it's not we understand now that it's no longer just these tumor cells by themselves in isolation, but they really communicate and interact with our body.

And so that's also a way to really improve treatments, find new treatments is how can we use our own body, how can we use our own immune system to work against those tumor cells?

Sure.

And this is so highly individualized.

It is why some one individual can live life long alongside a chemical plant and live until the age of 95 healthy.

And a colleague who dies at 45 of cancer.

Yes, that's.

There are also many environmental factors.

Yes, many aspects about environmental factors that we still do not understand.

But there's really good research being done at UAMs to try and understand that, especially here in Arkansas, in rural areas where you have very specific chemical exposures, to try to really understand how do those chemical exposures contribute to cancer, but also contribute to the side effects of cancer therapy when somebody does get treatment?

Sure.

At this stage in our understanding of of cancer, not just at u m s, but in the whole of of clinical science, clinical medical signs.

Where is the emphasis now?

Is it on environmental factors, hereditary factors a combination which outweighs the other?

It's the we know it's it's everywhere.

The research is still being done from the very basic our DNA and how the tumor cells develop as you mentioned earlier, all the way out to those environmental factors.

And how do those environmental factors interact to with the with our DNA, with our cells, with our body to, to promote cancer or not vice versa?

Yeah, but we are not where we were five years ago.

Oh, no.

It's, luckily science is growing very fast.

So it's a very interesting, field to be in because you can see it progress so quickly and you can see them there.

Yeah.

Not to put you on the spot, but if you could pick one aspect of cancer research now that offers the greatest, or is there such a thing as one that offers the greatest promise, what would it be?

I would mention then the the immune, us trying to really use our own immune system to battle the cancer.

So that's immunotherapy.

So there's, there's so much work being done and so much progress there to have really an additional, type of cancer therapy that can really make a big change to correct me if I'm wrong, but we now have them all but eliminate I think it's cervical cancer by immune, by, vaccines immunology.

And yes, there's also ways to prevent some, cancer.

So yes, vaccines we really need to keep keep an eye on on those because some are very important in preventing cancer.

All right.

Doctor Berman, thank you very much for coming aboard.

Thank you.

Come back soon.

It was such a pleasure.

Thank you.

With more progress.

Oh, absolutely.

Oh, yes, there will be.

All right.

Thanks.

Yes.

And that does it for us for this week.

As always, we thank you for watching.

See you next time.