Want bananas, coffee, chocolate? Hello, import tax!

In announcing his sweeping tariffs, U.S. President Donald Trump not only justified them by saying they’d protect manufacturing jobs, he also said they would benefit the country’s farmers. What a load of nonsense: Trump is about to make food in every American kitchen more expensive.

First, Trump’s justification on Wednesday: “Just as a nation that does not produce manufactured products cannot maintain the industrial base it needs for national security, neither can a nation long survive if it cannot produce its own food.”

For decades, the U.S. exported more foodstuff than it imported. It was, to borrow the slogan of one of the country’s top commodity traders, a “supermarket to the world.” Not anymore. Trump said the food trade surplus had been “eviscerated by a slew of new nontariff barriers” that have turned it into an expected record-large food trade deficit of $49 billion in fiscal year 2025-2026.

Unsurprisingly, Trump falsely claimed the deficit was a novelty that had nothing to do with him. “When I left office, the United States had a trade surplus in agricultural products,” he said. Granted, that’s technically true for 2021 and he left the White House in January that year. But Trump ignored that the U.S. suffered its first agricultural trade deficit in 60 years in 2019 under his administration. And the reason for this was his first trade war with China, which saw Beijing retaliate against American farm exports.

The change from surplus to deficit is due to three factors. First, America is losing market share in the global market for grains and oilseeds, a trend that has accelerated since Trump antagonized China in 2018. Second, American consumers are demanding year-round supply of horticultural products that are only seasonally available in the domestic market, inflating the import bill of horticultural goods. (Everyone wants avocados in January; coffee at any time; and green beans in winter.) Third, the cost of certain tropical products, including coffee and cocoa, has surged over the last few years to a record high, further increasing the import bill.

To explain why Trump is wrong about farming and trade, we could go back the lessons of David Ricardo, the classical economist who in the 19th century argued that countries should specialize in producing the goods where they have a comparative advantage. In cold and gray 1800s Britain, where Ricardo lived, that meant focus on manufacturing instead of corn. But, honestly, one doesn’t need to read Ricardo. Common sense and a basic knowledge of where things grow because of the weather is more than enough: If American consumers want coffee, they will have to import it; if they want bananas, they will need to buy them from overseas; if they want cocoa, that, too, would come from elsewhere. The weather in America, with a few exceptions in Hawaii and Florida, isn’t conductive to growing tropical food or most vegetables year round.

Trump’s message is simple: Do you want bananas? Then pay an import tax. While the White House granted widespread tariff exemptions for commodities — including for oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, gold, plus some fertilizers and numerous metals like copper — the administration didn’t extend them to a single agricultural commodity. Not one.

Whatever food comes to America from overseas, it will be affected by the new tariffs in full, starting in all cases 10%. (For now, Canada and Mexico aren’t affected, although some food-related commodities from Canada face tariffs already, like potash fertiliser.) In some cases, the impact will be brutal due to the extra tariffs on certain nations. Take Vietnam, the world’s largest producer of the robusta coffee bean, used to make instant coffee. The country faces a tariff of 46%. Or think about cocoa, the essential commodity to make chocolate. Ivory Coast is the world’s top cocoa producer, and it faces now a tariff of 21%. Madagascar is the largest producer of vanilla. The new tariff? 47%!

The final effect will be twofold. First, American farmers will lose out as wholesale prices will decline and foreign buyers will switch to alternative producers. The likes of Brazil, Argentina and Australia are going to make bank. So will Russia, which is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s largest exporters of grains. Second, American consumers will continue demanding the very same vegetables they’ve gotten used to year-round — and these will now be more expensive.

The farming deficit will change little, but food inflation will rise and Trump will need to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money helping American farmers to avoid bankruptcy. In Trump’s imagination, that’s winning.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”