The U.S. Would Need To Plant Up to 250,000 More Acres of Tomatoes To Replace Those Imported from Mexico

The Commerce Department’s 17.09 percent duties on most imports of tomatoes from Mexico went into effect on Monday. While the duties are intended to protect American tomato growers at the expense of Mexican ones, it is American consumers and tomato processors who will bear the burden.

The International Trade Administration (ITA), an agency within the Commerce Department, announced on April 14 its withdrawal from the September 2019 Agreement Suspending the Antidumping Investigation on Fresh Tomatoes from Mexico. The ITA began its antidumping investigation in April 1996 and determined in October of that year that fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico were being sold at “less than fair value” (LTFV) in the United States.

The ITA subjects foreign companies to antidumping duties when they “price their products in the U.S. market below the cost of production or below prices in their home markets,” according to the agency. Antidumping duties are additional tariffs “placed on the imported merchandise to offset the difference between the price…in the foreign market and the price in the U.S. market,” explains the Congressional Research Service.

To avoid these antidumping duties, Mexican exporters signed an agreement with the Commerce Department to sell fresh tomatoes at or above the established reference price of 21 cents per pound on November 1, 1996. The Tomato Suspension Agreement (TSA) was renewed in 2002, 2008, 2013, and 2019. Although the most recently established reference price is 50 percent greater (31 cents per pound for round and Roma tomatoes) than the one set in 1996, the ITA stated that the updated agreement “failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced Mexican imports.”

Imported tomatoes, 90 percent of which are from Mexico, now account for about 70 percent of the total U.S. supply. Before the 1996 TSA, domestic tomatoes accounted for over 70 percent of America’s supply, according to Southern Ag Today, a peer-reviewed publication led by the Southern Extension Economics Committee, among other academic institutions. However, this supply shift hasn’t occurred because the price of Mexican tomatoes was undercutting the cost of American tomatoes; the import price of the former has been at or above the farm price of domestically grown tomatoes since 1995. In 2024, Mexican tomatoes were imported at 74 cents per pound while the farm price of American-grown tomatoes was 56 cents per pound, according to the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Statistics Service price spreads data on fresh tomatoes.

The Commerce Department’s tomato tariffs will likely increase American families’ grocery bills. Jacob Jensen, trade policy analyst at the American Action Forum, tells Reason that the ITA’s 17 percent antidumping duties will result in a 6 percent to 10 percent increase in prices for the overall U.S. fresh tomato supply, translating to roughly $300 million in additional consumer costs annually. If the U.S. were to produce domestically the volume of tomatoes demanded by Americans, Jensen estimates it would “require between 42,000 and 250,000 additional acres of production to make up for a lack of Mexican tomatoes…[a] land area of up to six times the size of Washington, D.C.”

While imported Mexican tomatoes compete with American-grown tomatoes, they positively contribute to the American economy directly and indirectly. The $3.12 billion of Mexican tomatoes imported in 2024 generated an estimated economic impact of “$3.64 billion in direct effects and $4.69 billion in indirect and induced effects” while “supporting 46,936 full- and part-time jobs across the United States in various supporting and related industries,” according to an April 2025 study published by the Center for North American Studies at Texas A&M University.

The Commerce Department’s antidumping duties won’t only increase costs for grocers. They could cost some American workers their jobs and income.

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