TOPSHOT – A man harvests coffee during the end of the annual crop season at Lira farm in Santa Clara district, Porciúncula municipality, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil on July 21, 2025. (Photo by PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images)
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Earlier this year, President Donald J. Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on food imports, branding the move “Liberation Day” and framing it as an effort to bolster U.S. self-sufficiency. In the April 2, 2025 executive order, the White House declared that “neither can a nation long survive if it can’t produce its own food.”
This month, however, President Trump reversed course, signing another executive order—this one lifting tariffs on certain agricultural products that can’t be grown or produced at scale inside the U.S. including coffee, bananas, and orange juice. Trump said about the move, “We just had a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee are a little bit high now. They’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time.”
The new tariff exemptions for food products took effect retroactively at midnight on Thursday, November 13. Trump doesn’t expect more policy rollbacks in the future, saying, “I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”
Tariffs And Coffee
A tariff is a tax on imports. A country typically imposes tariffs to make money or protect certain industries from competition—sometimes, both. The idea is that tariffs make it more expensive to use foreign goods. In theory, this should mean a decline in imports and an uptick in the use of domestic goods, assuming that the goods are manufactured or available at home.
Economists suggest that tariffs can be effective in certain cases, such as the automotive industry. If it’s more expensive to import cars, domestic car companies may focus on production within the U.S., thereby boosting manufacturing.
But even the most protectionist tariffs can’t spur production of items that can’t be easily produced or grown in the U.S.—like coffee and bananas. Both are products that the United States consumes heavily but produces little to none of domestically. Coffee imports from major producers like Brazil and Vietnam faced tariffs as high as 50%, while bananas imported from Central and South America were similarly targeted.
Coffee only grows in specific parts of the world. The ideal growing conditions for coffee are a moderate tropical environment with rich, well-drained soils, high humidity, and minimal pests or diseases. That’s typically found in a region referred to as the world’s Coffee Belt, located between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and includes coffee giants like Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Mexico (Brazil is the world’s largest coffee-producing country, responsible for about a third of all beans).
Only one U.S. state—Hawaii—is located in that belt. That explains why Hawaii is the only U.S. state to grow coffee at any reasonable scale (and it produces far less than 1% of the world’s coffee). No matter how much we might wish it were different, the U.S. simply cannot produce enough coffee to meet the demand of its own population.
Nonetheless, the administration imposed tariffs on products like coffee. By September, coffee prices had surged more than 40% year-over-year, while the cost of bananas was up nearly 9%.
Tariff Exemptions
In an effort to tame prices, the White House released a list that includes more than 100 products that will no longer be included in the tariffs. Those on the list include:
- Cocoa;
- Black and green tea;
- Vanilla beans;
- Tropical fruits including bananas and oranges;
- Certain spices like ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg;
- Beef; and
- Nuts like macadamia and pine nuts.
Tariff Court Challenges
The tariffs—which cover far more than goods than coffee and bananas—have been challenged in court as unlawful. In August, a federal appeals court in Washington determined that Trump overstepped by relying on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the tariffs. Specifically, the court found that the power to tax, including the authority to impose tariffs, is vested in Congress by the Constitution. The President disagreed and has appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments earlier this month.
IEEPA, a 1977, law allows the president “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States,” if he declares a national emergency “with respect to such threat.” This includes regulating imports and exports. Trump suggests that there are two threats: the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. and large trade deficits.
Small businesses and states challenged the use of IEEPA in court, and those challenges eventually landed at the Supreme Court.
The theory asserted in those lawsuits is that the executive’s power to regulate imports does not include the power to impose tariffs. They go on to say that tariffs are effectively like the internal taxes collected by the IRS, and taxing power—apparently uniquely—can be delegated by Congress to the president only with a highly specific delegation.
Importantly, those challenging the president’s power to impose tariffs aren’t arguing that Congress cannot delegate the power to tax or to tariff, only that there is no delegation here. When Congress delegates the “uniquely dangerous” tax power to the president, they assert, it must speak clearly, preferably using specific words like “tariff.”
While the justices have been asked to resolve the matter quickly, it’s unclear when we’ll have the court’s ruling. However, if the oral arguments offer any sort of window into the Supreme Court’s leaning (they generally do), the Court appeared skeptical of President Donald Trump’s authority to impose sweeping tariffs. The justices seemed to agree with those who argued that the tariffs exceeded the president’s powers.
Tariff Rebate Checks
Even as Trump rolls back tariffs, he continues to tout them, insisting that they are a revenue raiser. To share the wealth, President Donald Trump pitched an on social media: Send everyone a $2,000 per person tariff “dividend.”
Since that time, Treasury Secretary Bessent, who initially indicated that the $2,000 could take other forms—like tax cuts—has also switched course, saying that the checks remain a possibility, but would likely need approval from Congress.
The checks are intended to ease cost of living concerns among voters. On Election Day, Democrats made gains in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia with voters saying they were concerned about affordability. Despite the administration’s assertions that prices have come down significantly, average grocery prices in the U.S. were 2.7% higher in September compared with last year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
When asked about the reversal, Trump conceded that some tariffs “may in some cases” lead to price increases, but maintained that the U.S. has “virtually no inflation…Going to be very soon even lower.”