Thanks to Donald Trump’s reckless trade policies, the Maine wild blueberry market has “nearly vanished.”  In the years before Trump’s trade war, Maine farmers saw profits and sales skyrocket. But after China imposed an 80% retaliatory tariff on wild blueberries, exports “plummeted.” Then, Trump’s bailout completely skipped over Maine’s hard-working wild blueberry farmers. Meanwhile, Senator Susan Collins wants to give Trump “credit for levying these tariffs against the Chinese.”  Maine’s farmers deserve a senator who will stand up for them in Washington. 

 

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 

 

NBC News: Trump’s trade war squeezes the juices out of Maine’s wild blueberry business

 

Kit Ramgopal

November 28, 2019

 

Key points:

 

  • “In Maine, where blueberries have been an important export since before the Civil War, the trade war has squeezed the juice out of an iconic state industry.

  • First, the trade war cost wild berry farmers a growing market in China, as China imposed gradually increasing tariffs on frozen fruit in response to U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Then none of the Trump administration’s trade-war bailout money reached Maine farmers.”

  • “Today, frozen wild blueberries face an 80 percent tariff in China. Exports have plummeted from $2.5 million in 2017 to just $61,000 this year as of September.”

  • “China first imposed tariffs on frozen fruit in April 2018 in response to the first big round of Trump administration tariffs on Chinese imports. China increased the tariffs in June and September 2019, each time after hikes in U.S. tariffs.”

  • “‘We just keep losing everything,’ said farmer Leon Perry. ‘Wild blueberries were everything to us.’”

  • “Exports to China quadrupled in three years — jumping from 1 percent to 7 percent of total U.S. wild blueberry exports by 2017. Leaders say they were expecting the floodgates to open in 2018. Instead, the industry found itself caught in the crossfire of the U.S.-China trade war.”

  • “‘We had made a major investment in the market and then the market more or less crashed,’ Kontur said. ‘Businesses go out of business when it crashes like that.’”

  • “As Mainers mourn the loss of the Chinese market, Canada’s Oxford Frozen Foods is ‘working hard to open new markets in places like China,’ according to a March press release. It may even be benefiting from the U.S. trade war bailouts while doing so.”

  • “Nobody knows how bad the blueberry industry is,” farmer Leon Perry said. “It seems to surprise people when I say there is no blueberry industry anymore. We lost our future.”