Pear Market Tariff Issues

Pear Market Tariff Issues. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Mexico’s tariff temper tantrum is causing plenty of concern across the Pacific Northwest with tariffs being leveled on grapes, cherries, apricots, strawberries and pears. Kevin Moffitt with USA Pears.

MOFFITT: This is certainly not great news for us. The good thing is it’s sort of coming at the end of our season but we still expect we’ll probably have a decrease of about 30% of our late season imports into Mexico due to this increase in the duty.

That 30% decrease could severely impact some late season export numbers.

MOFFITT: Where that really hurts is in the smaller sizes. We’re sitting on some small sized Anjou’s and Red Anjou’s that we’d really like to get into the export markets and this could curtail that a bit – quite a bit and last year our exports were roughly 600-thousand boxes in the April, May, June period down to Mexico.

The tariffs have not just been on food products and it seems Mexico is trying to drive their message home and Moffitt says they are doing what they can to combat the issue.

MOFFITT: We are working with the NW Horticultural Council who is taking the lead on this and we are also working with and through them with United Fresh Fruit which is a group based out of Washington DC that handles a lot of issues and management for the produce industry.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.