U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s stated plans to raise tariffs on a wide swath of imports has trade experts and seafood trade groups predicting a tumultuous four years for the seafood industry.
Trump has promised to institute a range of trade policies in his coming administration, including adding tariffs as high as 60 percent on goods from China and 20 percent on goods from other countries. Peter Quinter, a U.S. customs and international trade attorney at Florida-based law firm Gunster, told SeafoodSource that any additional import barriers will affect most of the seafood Americans eat.
“Seventy percent of seafood consumed by Americans is from other countries, so whatever international trade policies are espoused by the incoming Trump administration will be significant,” he said. “The incoming Trump administration appears to be very focused on international trade, especially with regard to the implementation of additional tariffs on many commodities applicable to all countries, particularly with China.”
The Trump administration used tariffs extensively during his last four years as president, and he established tariffs on Chinese goods starting in 2018 that impacted several seafood products. Those tariffs kicked off a trade war with China that saw retaliatory tariffs on seafood goods and caused sharp drops in U.S. exports to China. Maine lobster, for example, saw an 84 percent drop in exports immediately following China’s retaliatory tariffs.
However, the Trump administration’s impact on trade will span beyond just tariffs, Quinter said.
As president, he will appoint the secretary of each department in his cabinet, along with the deputy secretary and general counsel. He’ll also appoint the heads of agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Trade Representative – all of which will impact trade.
“I expect more antidumping and countervailing duty orders (shrimp is a good example) against countries regarding seafood,” Quinter said. “Particular to China, I expect the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act [UFLPA] to continue to expand the number of Chinese seafood suppliers to be added to the UFLPA Entity List maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”
The seafood industry in China has been implicated in the use of Uyghur labor, causing some companies in the U.S. to cut ties with Chinese processors and leading U.S. lawmakers to call on the Biden administration to impose Magnitsky sanctions against Chinese companies. The U.S. has also recently implemented new antidumping and countervailing duties on shrimp imports from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam – and Quinter said the U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA, and U.S. CBP will increase enforcement of trade remedy laws to prevent mislabeling.
Quinter said the administration will likely follow the same playbook it did last time in implementing new tariffs to satisfy legal requirements.
“As the Trump administration did in imposing Section 301 tariffs of 25 percent against products from China being shipped to the United States, the U.S. Department of Commerce had to first examine and establish that China was unfairly engaging in international trade by violating its intellectual property rights obligations,” Quinter said. “There is a provision in all our trade agreements that provides exceptions for ‘national security’ and ‘health and safety,’ and it is likely that the Trump administration will use those same explanations to arguably legally impose new and significant tariffs on imported merchants which would be paid by U.S. importers, despite language to the contrary in our bi-national and multi-national trade agreements and the obligations of membership in the World Trade Organization [WTO].”
Quinter said that the WTO will likely be ineffective at addressing any trade disputes that result from the Trump administration’s plans.
“Unfortunately, it is generally well-known and agreed by members of the WTO that the organization has been ineffective at addressing non-tariff barriers imposed by countries and resolving trade disputes between countries takes far too long,” he said.
Many seafood trade organizations are ...
