President Trump exempted foods like beef, coffee and bananas from his sweeping country-by-country tariffs on Friday, as his administration grapples with cost-of-living frustrations and quickly rising prices for some types of food.
The new exemption covers a range of tropical products that are often imported to the United States, including coffee, tea, bananas, mangoes, avocados, coconuts, pineapples, cocoa and spices such as nutmeg, according to an executive order. It also covers beef, oranges and tomatoes.
The White House said Mr. Trump decided to exempt the products on Friday because he’s made “substantial progress” in negotiating trade deals with other countries. A day earlier, Mr. Trump announced trade frameworks with four Latin American countries — Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador and Ecuador — that included relief for food that isn’t widely produced in the U.S.
The food products will no longer be covered by the “reciprocal” tariffs that Mr. Trump has imposed on most U.S. trading partners, which range from 10% to 40% or more. Some types of food could still be impacted by other forms of tariffs.
Mr. Trump told reporters Friday the tariff exemptions should cause prices to go down, and they mostly applied to food that is “not competitive in this country,” like bananas.
“We don’t make them in this country, so there’s no protection of our industries or our food products,” he said aboard Air Force One.
The moves come as polls show that voters remain nervous about inflation and wary of Mr. Trump’s approach to the issue, which helped propel him back to the White House last year.
Food prices rose 3.1% in the yearlong period ending in September, well below its peak of 11.4% in 2022, according to federal data. But certain types of food have surged: Beef prices were up 12.9% year-over-year in September, banana prices were up 6.9% and roasted coffee 18.9%.
Mr. Trump has insisted costs are actually down since he took over from former President Joe Biden, and has long denied that higher tariffs could push up consumer prices — a persistent fear raised by economists.
But rising beef prices have alarmed Mr. Trump, who accused foreign-owned meat packing companies earlier this month of “driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.”
Last month, Mr. Trump said he’s considering importing more beef from Argentina to help get prices down. It’s a delicate issue, though, because boosting beef imports could upset U.S.-based ranchers, who are typically supportive of the president. Trade groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association publicly criticized the idea.
Mr. Trump responded on Truth Social that ranchers “have to get their prices down.”
“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States,” he wrote. “If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible!”
