US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China

Re:US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China – 20% on EU by roxolotl on Thursday April 03, 2025 @09:16AM (#43569156)

You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.

There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.

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Re:US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China – 20% on EU by jm4 on Thursday April 03, 2025 @01:38PM (#43572992)

Hawaii is the only U.S. state where you can grow coffee and their coffee costs a fortune. You need tropical weather and high altitude. Florida won't cut it. Besides, we already have fruit rotting in the fields in Florida because there's no one to pick it.

Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.

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Re:US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China – 20% on EU by baby-yoda on Thursday April 03, 2025 @02:57PM (#43573852)

Puerto Rico (yes not a state) has active coffee farms.

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Re:US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China – 20% on EU by lupusreal on Thursday April 03, 2025 @04:05PM (#43574704)

There are olive farms as far north as Oregon. I visited one a few years ago and bought some olive oil; it was very good.

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