US import tax worries border-region growers

Last month White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer mentioned a 20 percent tariff, levied on Mexican goods, as a possible way Mexico could pay for the border wall which is estimated to cost around $20 billion. He later said this tariff was only one of many options to finance the wall.

Jessie Gunn, a spokeswoman for Wholesum Harvest, said increasing the cost of Mexican imports would dramatically affect the produce industry and could make it harder for low-income Americans to afford healthy food.

“Produce doesn’t operate on a huge profit margin, we operate on a fairly conservative one,” Gunn said over the noise of the Nogales packaging facility, as workers examined and boxed tomatoes going by on a conveyor belt.

“A lot of it is about moving numbers, not making a huge margin on one shipment. So we can’t really absorb that kind of increase. It’s going to have to be passed on.”

Gunn said she also fears the impact of an import tax on American farmers if a tax leads to a trade war. Mexican Senator Armando Rios Piter suggested in mid-February that Mexico should boycott American corn and buy it from other countries instead.

“We have a very symbiotic relationship with American ag and American farmers, so you’re going to hurt American farmers who are already heavily subsidized because there will of course be some sort of reaction if they can’t export their grow crops to Mexico,” she said.

Read more at tucson.com