AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Let's talk tomatoes, you know, America's favorite fruit that thinks it's a vegetable. It's caught up in the trade war between the U.S. and Mexico, and higher prices could ketchup with consumers. But Florida tomato growers say that tariffs are necessary. Texas Public Radio's David Martin Davies reports.
(CROSSTALK)
DAVID MARTIN DAVIES, BYLINE: It's another busy lunch at Mi Tierra Mexican food restaurant in San Antonio's historic Market Square, and hot plates are hitting the tables. One ingredient present in every order is the red tomato.
PETE CORTEZ: Tomato is just about in every product that we sell, whether it's in taco meat, in carne guisada. Almost every recipe has tomatoes. Pete Cortez, chief enchilada officer, CEO of La Familia Cortez Restaurants.
DAVIES: Cortez says, without tomatoes, you don't have Mexican food.
CORTEZ: Huevos rancheros, you know, you don't get the ranchero if you don't get the ranchero sauce that's tomato-based.
DAVIES: Cortez says last year, his restaurants diced about 200,000 pounds of tomatoes. Every one was grown in Mexico.
CORTEZ: The tomato that we're able to get from Mexico is, frankly, superior.
DAVIES: And Cortez is concerned about what an impending tariff on the fruit from Mexico is going to do to his prices.
CORTEZ: If the cost of tomato goes up by 25%, then people are going to probably start looking elsewhere.
DAVIES: On July 14, the United States is set to impose a 21% antidumping duty on most fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico. Dumping, in this case, means Mexican tomatoes are being sold in the U.S. below what it costs them to be produced. Robert Guenther, vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, says this duty is different from the Trump tariffs.
ROBERT GUENTHER: The reason why this is called an antidumping duty versus a tariff is because that the U.S. government has concluded that the Mexican tomato industry has been dumping tomatoes illegally into the United States.
DAVIES: Guenther says over 25 years ago, the Department of Commerce ruled that Mexico was illegally undercutting Florida's tomato-growing industry.
GUENTHER: They broke the law. They broke the U.S. trade law.
SKIP HULETT: So none of this makes sense anymore.
DAVIES: Skip Hulett is the chief legal officer at NatureSweet, a San Antonio-based company specializing in growing, packaging and selling greenhouse-grown tomatoes, a majority of them grown in Mexico. Hulett says NatureSweet isn't dumping Mexican tomatoes. He asked, how then would they stay in business? And he points out that the investigation into Mexico's tomato imports was conducted decades ago.
HULETT: Maybe it did in '95 and '96, but they put up an agreement in place that was - in one form or another, has been there for 30 years to protect the U.S. industry.
DAVIES: But during that time, the U.S. tomato industry has been withering. Its share of the U.S. market has dropped from 80- to 30%.
GUENTHER: So we've lost farms. We've lost jobs.
DAVIES: Hulett counters by saying Mexico growers were able to produce a tastier tomato in high volume using state-of-the-art greenhouse technology. Guenther responds that the Department of Commerce said...
GUENTHER: There are no differences between quality, freshness, taste of tomatoes.
DAVIES: And Guenther says, based on experience, the 21% duty will not result in higher prices. But Hulett says NatureSweet will have to raise its prices because of the tariff. Tomato, to-mat-o, tariff or duty, consumers might say it's all the same to them, but if it does mean higher prices, they won't be happy. Mexico already isn't happy. The Mexican government has indicated the possibility of imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. meat exports, including chicken and pork, if the tomato duties are enacted.
For NPR News, I'm David Martin Davies in San Antonio. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
