The Trump administration accuses Mexico of “dumping” tomatoes on the US — something the US would never dream of doing with the agricultural goods it sends to Mexico (sarc).
The Trump administration continues to escalate its economic war against its largest trade partner, Mexico. In recent weeks alone, Washington has imposed potentially fatal sanctions on two smallish Mexican banks and a brokerage house, which were quietly paused last week; it has implemented a 3.5% tax on the remittance payments US-based migrants, many of them Mexican, send home; and it has escalated its raids on migrants, many of them also Mexican.
Now, to cap things off, Washington just imposed a 17% tariff on US imports of tomatoes, almost all of which come from Mexico. As Bloomberg notes, the move comes just days after Trump unveiled plans to impose a 30% tariff, beginning Aug. 1, on many Mexican products that don’t fall under the USMCA agreement he negotiated in his first term.
The Trump administration accuses Mexican farmers of unfairly “dumping” (i.e. selling at an artificially low price) tomatoes on the US market — something the US would never dream of doing with the agricultural goods it exports to Mexico, if you’ll excuse my sarcasm.
“Mexico remains one of our greatest allies, but for far too long our farmers have been crushed by unfair trade practices that undercut pricing on produce like tomatoes. That ends today,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement. “This rule change is in line with President Trump’s trade policies and approach with Mexico.”
Mexico’s Sheinbaum government begged to differ, arguing that market share won by Mexican tomato farmers in past decades is a result of “the quality of the product, and not any unfair practice.” She also said the tariff would probably have limited impact on the exports of Mexican tomatoes to the US given the scale of US dependency.
A Long Time Coming
For its part, the Florida Tomato Exchange (FTE), a lobby that represents the state’s growers, packers and shippers and enjoys close ties to the Trump administration, welcomed the move, stating that “the playing field will finally be levelled” for U.S. growers.
The FTE has waited a long time for this moment. The first time it accused Mexican farmers of “dumping” practices was back in 1996, just two years into NAFTA. In response, Mexican farmers agreed to set a floor price on tomatoes in a bid to ensure that US farmers were not being undercut. In return, the US suspended an investigation into the Mexican farmers’ alleged dumping practices.
Since then four rounds of agreements have taken place, the last one in 2019. But the times for normalised trade relations between the US and Mexico appear to be well and truly over.
As with so many of Trump 2.0’s trade policies, the tariffs on Mexican tomatoes are likely to backfire, with the price ultimately being paid by US consumers. Two out of every three tomatoes consumed in the US come from Mexico, according to official figures.
Since the signing of NAFTA in 1994 the market share of US tomatoes has slumped to 30% from 80%, according to the Florida Farm Bureau, while imports of Mexican tomatoes have increased four fold. The tomato trade between the two countries is now worth close to $3 billion.
“There is no way that Florida can supply the local market in terms of quality, quantity and price; impossible,” Antonio Ortiz-Mena, a Mexican expert in geopolitics and professor of international trade at Georgetown University, told BBC Mundo. In addition, “there are U.S. companies that have investments in tomatoes in Mexico, not only because of the low labour costs but, above all, because of the climatic conditions and economies of scale. So they will also be affected.”
Tons of Floridan tomatoes have already gone to waste as a result of Trump’s tariffs and migration crackdown, as WSVN Miami reported in mid-May:
With tariff talks top of mind, South Florida farmers say they’re in trouble. Crops are rotting on the vine and they’re blaming the ongoing trade wars and immigration changes. What does this mean for the future of our food? 7’s Heather Walker investigates.
Perfectly good tomatoes are being plowed over — instead of picked. It’s a sad scene happening in South Florida.
Heather Moehling, President, Miami-Dade County Farm Bureau: “You can’t even afford to pick them right now. Between the cost of the labor and the inputs that goes in, it’s more cost-effective for the farmers to just plow them right now.”
Although the tariffs on Mexico did not came into effect for goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, including tomatoes, the threat of tariffs alone was enough to disrupt the U.S. market:
“The Mexican industry exported, in some cases, double and triple the daily volumes to beat being subject to the 25 percent tariff in February and March and the 10 percent tariffs in April. That just devastated our markets in the U.S.,” [Tony DiMare, president of DiMare Homestead, which owns over 4,000 acres of tomato farms in Florida and California told WVSN].
Farmers say President Trump’s tariffs and the threat of tariffs have caused thousands of acres of tomatoes to go to waste because the price to pick and pack them costs more than what the tomatoes are selling for this year.
Changes in immigration are also taking a toll, with many pickers afraid to go to work.
Homestead farm worker: “Many workers have left, others are leaving now… A lot of people are really afraid and sometimes they come, sometimes they don’t come and the harvest is lost because it cannot be harvested, so that’s why so much produce is lost.”
The Trump administration is already aware of the strain its erratic policies are having on the nation’s farmers. In April, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that her agency is preparing a contingency bailout plan for farmers should the trade wars continue to escalate.
“We are working on that. We are preparing for it. We don’t believe it will be necessary,” Rollins said.
In other words, US citizens could end up paying doubly for Trump’s tariffs, first through higher prices at the checkout and secondly through bailouts to US farmers. Meanwhile, on the Mexican side of the border concerns have been raised that if Trump’s tariffs are effective in bringing down US imports of Mexican tomatoes (a big “IF” for reasons already outlined), one possible beneficiary will be the drug cartels, which Trump claims to be waging total war against.
BBC Mundo (machine translation):
“Mexican tomatoes are going to become cheaper, but the question is how companies are going to deal with this problem. They are going to have to reduce their workforce, they are going to have to rethink how many hectares they are going to plant,” said Faustino Delgado, a leader of the agricultural workers union.
Most of the industry, moreover, is in Sinaloa. The so-called “Sinaloa red pearl” is produced there. Agro-export land coexists alongside land belonging to of one of the most important drug trafficking cartels in the world.
Over the past year, a war between factions of the Sinaloa cartel has put the state on tenterhooks and a curfew is currently in place in the capital, Culiacan. The roads where the tomatoes comes out, in addition, are on the front lines of the battle.
“A tariff like this exacerbates the problems driving Mexican workers to either want to migrate to the US in search of opportunities or to swell the ranks of organized crime,” Ortiz-Mena says.
The potential fallout of a tomato tariff extend far beyond the commercial realm.
Pot, Meet the Mother of All Kettles
Perhaps the maddest — and most maddening — aspect of the Trump administration’s imposition of sanctions on Mexican tomatoes is the stated justification, or pretext, for doing so: namely, that Mexico’s farmers are “dumping” tomatoes on the US market. In doing so, it seeks to paint US famers as victims of underhand market practices by their Mexican competitors.
However, when it comes to dumping (i.e. selling at an artificially low price) agricultural produce on the international markets, no one, with the possible exception of the EU, comes close to the US’ heavily subsidised farmers and Big Ag corporations. For decades the US has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world by unleashing on to the global markets surplus produce at below-cost price.
One of the biggest victims is Mexico. Over the years, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has published reports tracking the incremental harm US dumping of basic agricultural staples has done to Mexico’s ability to feed itself. From its 2023 report, Swimming Against the Tide: Mexico’s Quest for Food Sovereignty in the Face of U.S. Agricultural Dumping:
In 1994, NAFTA eliminated most of the trade restrictions Mexico had used to protect its farmers from foreign competition, and in 16 of the 28 years since, the U.S has dumped corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton exports into Mexico at prices 5%-40% below what it cost to produce them. In turn, Mexican producers of these crops experienced prices drops of 50%-68% in the 12 years after NAFTA took effect. From 2014 to 2020, U.S. exports of priority food crops came into Mexico at unfairly low prices, undermining the incentives for Mexican farmers to increase production.
The US was able to do this by continuing to subsidize agricultural producers even after NAFTA while Mexico’s government pulled most of its subsidies. Mexico’s political class, in thrall to neoliberal ideas such as economic liberalisation, privatisation and “free” trade, showed scant interest in safeguarding, let alone developing, the country’s internal market. The government had already begun slashing subsidies to Mexican famers over a decade before NAFTA.
As a result, it became all but impossible for small and mid-sized producers to compete with producers from the US once NAFTA once signed. Inevitably, Mexico became increasingly dependent on the US for staple crops like corn, beans, wheat and rice. Once the birthplace of maize, Mexico now imports roughly half of the corn it consumes, almost all of it from the US.
At the same time, it has significantly increased its exports to the US of tomatoes, chiles, avocado, coffee, grapes, strawberries and water melon. But it’s the staple crops that matter most.
Salgado Uberto Salgado Nieto, a researcher at the Institute of Economic Research, points out that the the main consequence of NAFTA, almost certainly intended, “was the loss of food sovereignty, because the large producers [that were left standing] were not geared at producing basic grains for the Mexican diet such as corn and beans, but at producing avocados, berries and tropical fruits that are in high demand outside the country.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that the threshold at which a country becomes what it calls “food-vulnerable” is when as much as 25% of its food supply comes from abroad. According to a study published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, by 2011 Mexico was sourcing 50% of the food it consumes, especially basic grains, from abroad, mostly from the US. By 2021, the figure had reached 57%.
When the government of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador sought to reverse this trend by prioritising local production of staples and banning US-grown GM corn for human consumption, the US resumed its dumping of corn. As Timothy A Wise and Stewart A.L. James reported in January, export prices were on average 14% below production costs between Aug 2023 and Dec 2024:
U.S. corn dumping had been at pause as U.S. export prices skyrocketed above production costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend protracted further by the Russia-Ukraine war’s impact on world grain markets. But dumping is now back, with a vengeance.
This resumption is not unique to corn, though we focus on it here as a particularly relevant case study. Our earlier report documented U.S. agricultural dumping in a number of other commodity markets including soy, wheat, cotton, and rice. It seems clear that the resumption of corn dumping is symptomatic of a broader trend across several crops. And USDA projections show that low prices will likely persist in coming years.
In other words, while the Trump administration accuses Mexico’s tomato growers of dumping their produce on the US, US growers are doing exactly the same thing with corn in Mexico, and could well be doing the same with other staple foods in the near future. Also, as readers may recall, when AMLO tried to ban GMO corn, mainly for health reasons, the US and Canadian governments called for the formation of a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA trade deal. Unsurprisingly, the panel ruled against Mexico.
Alienating the US on the Global Stage
In sum, not only are Trump’s tariffs on Mexican tomatoes likely to fuel higher prices for US consumers, they could also push agricultural workers in Sinaloa into the welcoming arms of the drug cartels or even towards the increasingly militarised US border. The way things are looking in Florida, some of them may even be allowed across, if only to pick a few days worth of tomatoes before being raided by ICE.
Meanwhile, the latest tariff threats exacerbate economic uncertainty while further alienating the US — and its partners — on the global stage.
As we noted last week, Trump’s threat to impose 50% tariffs against Brazil days after President Lula spoke openly about dedollarisation at the BRICS summit is likely to work in Lula’s favour and against the interests of Trump’s close ally in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Lo and behold, the New York Times just reported that Trump’s Brazil tariff threats have rekindled support for Lula while the Bolsonarists who allegedly called for the tariffs are being widely denounced as traitors.
Admittedly, Mexico’s Sheinbaum government is far more constrained than Brazil in terms of how it can respond to Trump’s threats, for an assortment of reasons: Mexico’s geographic position, so close to the US, alongside its geopolitical reality, so far from the “Global South”; its near-total dependence on the US economy; the highly asymmetrical nature of its relationship with the US; and the constant, overhanging threat of US military intervention.
But even Sheinbaum may soon have to throw caution to the wind. Recent polls suggest that her cool, calm approach to Trump may be losing appeal among voters as Trump escalates his attacks.
This may explain why Mexico agreed to participate in the recent BRICS summit, for the first time ever, as well as why it is now seeking to forge closer ties with its USMCA partner, Canada, with a view to aligning their strategies for negotiating with Trump. As readers may recall, in the days immediately following Trump’s election in late November, senior Canadian politicians were calling for Mexico’s removal from USMCA. Now, they are looking for a rapprochement. Once again, Trump is excelling in his accidental role as the great global unifier.
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I guess that tomato workers are Mexican and Central Americans on both sides of the border, so US has to decide where they should work. FL growers may contract in Guatemala or Honduras and hire people there to work there. And their land in FL could be used for “grass fed beef” or “free range eggs”. Recently I started to eat a Roma (small) tomato every day, so I can suffer an equivalent of the cost of a cigarette every day (or almost that much), but what about larger families?
Thanks for the good story. The Helmer in Links talks about Trump’s mental deterioration–can no longer tie his own shoelaces?–and raises the question of how much longer his erratic course can continue. Maybe I should take a shot at growing my own tomatoes which would be way better than the supermarket versions, wherever they are from.
If you do plan on growing tomatoes, I would recommend trying to grow a few some plants indoors first, and then expand outside or into a greenhouse after you find what works and doesn’t. Unlike most leaf or root vegetables like lettuce or carrots, which have growth cycles in one to two months, tomatoes can take three months before you get something resembling a harvest. Losing your plants before they fruit can be a bit demoralizing. Growing them indoors also gives you an opportunity to practice transplanting them from either small to large pots, or pots to soil, which is also a useful skill to develop.
Absolutely great advice and to Dave’s comment below, there are numerous heirloom varieties that are great for eating, canning or freezing. They will look nothing like what you find in your average produce aisle but taste better and there are varieties that along with being better to grow in your particular climate, may have more resilience to pests and diseases.
Check out companies like Fedco seeds and Sustainable Seeds. Many others out there too.
I find it hard to believe that tomatoes can be successfully grown indoors — unless you have a greenhouse.
Of course they can, with correct lighting and nutrients
https://www.instructables.com/Easily-Grow-Hydroponic-Tomatoes-Inside-or-Outside-/
I just grow them outdoors because the California climate is near-perfect for them. The Netherlands is one of the biggest tomato exporters believe it or not. I recall driving from Maastricht to Amsterdam on the A2 in winter and seeing row upon row of lit and heated greenhouses full of tomatoes. They are “not bad, for store bought”
And I cannot agree more: home-grown tomatoes are the best. I can’t eat store bought tomatoes. The organic “heirloom” varieties at the stores are good, but ridiculously expensive – $5 USD, or more, each, not per pound, each! The one semi-affordable tomato (grown in Baja CA, MEX) are the “Campari” variety. However, now those will become over-priced due to the idiot emperor.
a link here to Tree Hugger years ago was for a one pot variety of vegetables. I don’t have the outdoor light so had to give up on that dream but there were one pot tomatoes seeds available.
Once you grow your own tomatoes, you’ll realize very quickly the poor quality you’ve become accustom to from the grocery store because you didn’t know any better.
I can’t pick my tomatoes fast enough. I already have 4 large jars of pasta sauce in my freezer. Neighbors are sated as well.
A neighbor used to supply the real deal but no more. I love tomatoes but rarely buy them.
They will be an education to grow. We grow our own, but I’m the only one who eats them in our household. Having heavy clay soil, a good bit of soil “remediation” is in order. When a suitable soil is achieved, (lots of sand, rotted leaves, and compost added,) a locally adapted variety of tomato practically grows itself. We have become accustomed to smaller fruits, probably due to the higher temperatures averaged here. Just keep an eye out for the dreaded hornworms.
See: https://vegetables.ces.ncsu.edu/tomatoes-field-production/
Bon appetit!
And sadly this is some of the stuff Trump is nuking going after universities in one way or another
This is mind bending. You need very serious support systems for the weight:
Staking and Pruning Tomatoes in the Home Garden
And my first thought is if this is “normal” per se, or if we’ve bred these plants so thoroughly for bearing fruit that they can’t support themselves, or maybe they were never intended to?
Interesting to think about
I remember reading that while the tomato plant is often called a “vine”, it should more accurately be called a “rambler”. It “rambles” over the ground, not seeking support but simply lengthening itself. Wherever its “vine” touches the ground, it can root from the “vine” into the ground at that point. Every hair on a tomato “vine” is able to turn into a root if the conditions are right.
I would like to see somene do a whole growing season long time-lapse photography filming of a tomato plant or plants growing on uninterrupted ground. I bet they would like snakes roaming around.
A way to test for the artificiality or not of tomato vininess would be to look at present day primitive tomatoes and wild tomato relatives. Are they upright bushes, ramblers or what?
The next few years will be interesting for Mexico. I would imagine that the plan for Mexico is to re-orientate their economy away from the US – and Mexico – as much as possible so that they are not so totally dependent on them. And I am sure that countries like China and Brazil be be glad to lend a helping hand here. I do not think for a moment that the 30% tariffs that Trump is threatening Mexico with will be the last of it as he will always come back for more concessions to squeeze from Mexico. it is his nature. I wouldn’t want to be an American corporation trying to get a contract signed in Mexico right now as the atmosphere would be quite chilly. So maybe the Mexican government can encourage a lot of those tomato growers to switch to crops for local consumption and encourage Mexicans to buy them with a ‘Grown in Mexico’ stamp. It wouldn’t be the Mexican government’s fault if Mexicans buy Mexican produce over American or Canadian produce.
But what about re-orientation of folks with vegetable addictions in USA? Grim resignation or rebellion?
OTH, health indicators like obesity have room for improvement in Mexico, a big campaign to eat more healthily could be positive for small farms and city nutrition.
I’m beginning to wonder, who does Trump not threaten?
Missing sentence ending at:
“Also, as readers may recall, when”
Fixed. Thanks vao, much appreciated.
If one of the results is indeed an expansion of the cartel plantations, I would expect to see not long after cross-border incursions by the US military to destroy said plantations. The excuse will be to stop the inflow of Mexican drugs in the face of Mexico’s inaction. How Mexico responds to these raids will certainly set the stage for future conflicts. If a single Mexican helicopter crosses the border to say drop a hand grenade on some American runway that was used as a staging ground for the American raids, I would expect the chickenhawks to lose their minds and full-on war with Mexico to be initiated shortly thereafter. Maybe Ukraine could return some of those 155 mm munitions to help a friend out.
Has the U.S. military already received training from the IDF on how to destroy farms owned by brown people?
The IDF doctrine is not to destroy the farms, but to “eliminate” the ‘off colour’ workers.
Actually, cutting down trees and destructively plowing fields is SOP for Israelis. In Gaza, the Israeli military has been systematically destroying agricultural land; 22% of it had been destroyed by December 2023, 57% of it by June 2024, and over 90% of it by April 2025.
Curious that. It looks like cutting off the groves to spite one’s place. So, how do the Zionist Settler Colonists feed themselves if the agricultural land is despoiled?
The olive groves I have read were signs of the long term settlement of the region by Paleo Palestinians. So, just as in Ye Olde Testament, to cut down the sacred groves on the top of the hills was a religious desecration, so as to make the “undesirables” rootless and liable for expulsion. The destruction of the olive groves today I would view in a similar vein. It is a trick of psychological warfare to dishearten and demoralize the Palestinians slated for removal.
I would be curious to see how the generally city bred Zionist Settlers view agriculture. Will they do like America does and “import” cohorts of “off colour” field workers to do the heavy lifting? If so, I can see the Zionist State devolving into legal slavery. It’s in the Bible after all!
When it comes to Gaza, my opinion, which I already stated in this forum, is that it will never be rebuilt or re-settled. Only a tiny sliver of Gaza will be set up to exploit the offshore gas fields. Agriculture, because of the destruction of the land and the pollution of groundwater, is no longer reasonably feasible there.
When it comes to the West Bank, I have come to think that the settlers who are stealing Palestinian land, rustling Palestinian ewe flocks and donkeys, and uprooting Palestinian olive trees are actually losers from the Jewish community. The ones who were not able to be successful in their origin country (whether USA, France, Argentina, or Ukraine), who could not start anything related to agriculture in Israel proper (because all land there has been firmly under the control of old-time zionists who immigrated pre-1948), could not succeed in the cut-throat economic environment of Israel, and who, conveniently encouraged by the zionist ideology and the Israeli government, felt that stealing Palestinians and destroying what they could not grab is a suitable way out. Jewish winners do not become settlers in the West Bank: they go into the vibrant Israeli high-tech, or trade, or finance.
And yes: I also feel that one can call the destruction of olive trees a sin — the kind of sin that sends the perpetrators straight to hell.
Thanks for the perspective. I agree that this “crop” of Zionist Settlers are destined for H—, a H— of their own designing.
It reminds me of Rome’s persecution of Carthage. Tear down the walls and plow the land with salt so as to curse its very memory.
The madness indeed…
Analysts, like John Helmer, Larry Wilkerson, Scott Ritter, Andrei Martyanov, Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff…
have all called the so-called president various things like an idiot, madman, imbecile, moron, extreme narcissist, mentally-deranged etc. (not to mention he might be a pedophile and rapist)
When we thought we had reached Peak Kakistocracy with the Genocide Joe regime, we now have the emperor who lost his marbles. The Sycophant-Stenographers (corporate monopoly “journalists”), and even the so-called opposition pretend not to notice and we plebs are not supposed to notice. Everything is normal, the US is a democracy, respects the rule of law, human rights, trade agreements etc. How can anyone do business with a incompetent regime, headed by a madman?
I can’t help but notice that the president has an antisocial personality disorder (lack of conscience is almost pathognomonic for the disorder)
Seems that cognition is in decline as well since he speaks like a 4th grader.
I would add to that that a 4th grader from fifty or sixty years ago spoke in a much more sophisticated manner than do today’s grade schoolers. Even though I am not the best example to cite, we were taught proper English, grammar and vocabulary, and were taught to read logically. Today??? I know not what The Master Apprentice’s excuse is.
info & seed for home tomato growers . . .
There are two small seed companies which carry many kinds of tomato seed ( and some other seed too).
Totally Tomatoes Seed Company: https://www.totallytomato.com/
and Tomato Growers Supply Company : https://tomatogrowers.com/
There is a book with good information and methods called: How to Grow World Record Tomatoes ( by Charles Wilber).
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/how-to-grow-world-record-tomatoes