Sao Paulo — US President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a new 50% tariff on all Brazilian products from August 1 could devastate the South American nation’s citrus belt, as factories reduce production and orange farmers consider leaving fruit to rot as prices drop sharply.
“You are not going to spend money to harvest and not have anyone to sell to,” grower Fabricio Vidal, said from his farm in Formoso, in the state of Minas Gerais. The new tariffs could make it impossible for his fruit to enter the US, which buys 42% of the orange juice exported from Brazil, a trade worth about $1.31bn in the season that ended in June.
Orange prices in Brazil dropped to 44 reais (about $8) a box this month, almost half of what they were a year ago, according to the widely followed Cepea index from the University of Sao Paulo, illustrating how Trump’s disruptive trade policies can sow chaos even before enacted.
“As the day approaches when tariffs will come into effect, anxiety increases about what might happen,” said Ibiapaba Netto, the head of orange juice exporter lobby CitrusBR.
Consumer impact
US orange juice production dropped to the lowest level 50 years in the 2024/25 harvest, with output estimated at 108.3-million gallons, according to data from the US department of agriculture, cited by Cepea, which shows imports will represent 90% of US supplies through September.
US consumers will bear the brunt along with Brazilian farmers. An astounding half of the orange juice Americans drink comes from Brazil under household brands such as Tropicana, Minute Maid and Simply Orange.
Brazil, which produces 80% of the world’s orange juice, will be hard to replace, too. The US has become more dependent on orange juice imports in recent years due to the “citrus greening” crop disease, hurricanes and spells of freezing temperatures.
The new tariff on Brazilian imports represents a more than sixfold increase over the $415 per ton duty levied on the country’s juice now.
Johanna Foods, a New Jersey-based producer and distributor of fruit juices, has challenged the proposed tariffs on Brazilian orange juice in court, claiming they would cause “significant and direct financial harm” to the company and US consumers.
The tariffs may also spell trouble for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which account for about 60% of the orange juice sold in the US, Netto said. Neither company replied to requests for comment.
No easy answer
Brazil won’t find it easy to replace American consumers, some of the most avid orange juice drinkers in the world. Typically, higher-income countries import orange juice, limiting Brazil’s potential reach into new markets. Brazilian orange juice is sold to about 40 nations — or only about a third of the destinations that buy Brazilian meat, for example, according to trade data.
CitrusBR’s Netto noted that hefty duties in markets such as India and South Korea, as well as low household income in China, have hampered trade with Brazil.
The EU already buys about 52% of Brazil’s total exports, making it unlikely that countries there will make up for lost business with the US.
Companies will be left with few options. One would be to export Brazilian orange juice through Costa Rica, which some companies already do to avoid current duties, said Arlindo de Salvo, an independent orange consultant. But it is unclear whether exporters will be able to pull it off once the new levy starts being enforced.
CitrusBR said such “triangulation” via Costa Rica is impossible under rules of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As companies struggle to find new paths to consumers, farmers in Formoso fear the worst. Prices have already dropped to about a third of what growers were paid at this time last year, farmers said, making the cost of picking oranges hardly worth the trouble.
Grower Ederson Kogler said the only solution would be to find other markets. But, he added, “these are things that don’t happen overnight.”
Reuters
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