In 2018, President Donald Trump launched a trade war that primarily targeted China but extended well beyond the United States’ biggest overseas trading partner. Five years later, President Joe Biden has neglected corrective action and Washington exporters are still feeling the impact.
Any strategy that diminishes international trade has an oversized impact in Washington. In what is considered the most trade-dependent state — because of a broad roster of products aimed at a global market and because of easy access to transportation routes — an estimated 40 percent of Washington’s jobs are tied to international trade.
As the Washington Council on International Trade writes: “With 96 percent of the world’s consumers living beyond the U.S. borders, for Washington state to truly thrive and leverage its powerful advantages, it must fully engage in the global economy.”
Trade wars mitigate those advantages. Having claimed that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump imposed tariffs on many imports, leading to retaliatory tariffs from various trading partners. By 2020, the centrist Brookings Institution concluded that the actions “have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve.”
One example can be found in a trade war between the United States and India. In 2019, in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, India imposed tariffs on American tree fruit. That action hit home in Washington, which accounts for more than half of the nation’s apple, pear and cherry production. In the wake of the trade war, the state’s apple exports to India plummeted from $120 million to $3 million.
In January, Washington’s entire congressional delegation sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo seeking help in the removal of India’s tariffs. “The damage inflicted by the retaliatory tariffs on tree fruit growers, their employees, and communities is clear and a solution is long overdue,” the letter reads in part.
Yes, a solution is long overdue. Washington’s elected representatives must continue to place pressure on the Biden administration to reverse deleterious trade wars.
As a member of the House Committee on Agriculture, first-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, is in position to understand and deal with the issues facing Washington fruit growers. That includes the impact of tariffs and the collapse of a previously robust India market for Washington apples.
As The Seattle Times writes editorially: “The loss hit legacy family farms particularly hard. India bought mostly Red Delicious apples, a varietal whose popularity has declined domestically. Growers cannot quickly switch out trees when market appetites change.”
Last month, leaders of the U.S. Apple Association met with White House representatives to share their frustration over the situation. Vice Chair Steve Clement of Yakima said: “Steel and aluminum tariffs continue to be one of the biggest challenges facing the apple industry. We’ve been cut out of the India market due to 70 percent tariffs, and the China market has dwindled to nearly nothing. Many growers who have been thinking about renewing their orchards don’t see a point and are instead getting out.”
The impacts of a specious trade war are starting to have long-term effects that will be difficult to reverse. The Biden administration must recognize those effects and alter policies that are harmful to the U.S. economy.
