Florida Tomato Exchange: Many growers support ending U.S.-Mexico Tomato Suspension Agreement

The push to end the U.S.-Mexico Tomato Suspension Agreement is supported by most American tomato growers. That’s the assertion of the Florida Tomato Exchange (FTE), which filed a request June 16 with the Department of Commerce to terminate the agreement. 

The FTE said in a news release that the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, which represents distributors of Mexican produce, “wildly” mischaracterized the issues regarding the request, including framing it as a “Florida versus Mexico” issue.

Related: Florida tomato leaders asks Commerce Department to revise approach to Mexico-U.S. tomato trade

The FPAA didn’t make a legal argument in response to the request to terminate the suspension agreement, the FTE said in its release.

“In 2019, the Mexican industry and FPAA had their day in court to prove that Mexican tomatoes weren’t being dumped and weren’t materially injuring the U.S. tomato industry,” the FTE said in the release. “They lost the case on both counts before the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission. It was determined that Mexican tomatoes were being dumped at an average margin of 20.91%, even with the previous suspension agreements in place."

The current suspension agreement suspends those margins from going into effect as antidumping duties, and the FTE release said that such suspension agreements allow the Department of Commerce to suspend antidumping duties if the agreements stop injury caused by unfair imports. 

However, the FTE in its release said none of the tomato suspension agreements, which date back to 1996, have worked to stop the injury caused by dumped Mexican tomatoes, “which is why the FTE finally asked the Commerce Department to terminate the suspension,” the group said.

“Instead of legal arguments against the FTE’s request, the FPAA has mischaracterized the request as a fight between Mexico and Florida,” the FTE said in the release. “It is not. The Florida Tomato Exchange is the ‘domestic petitioner’ in the antidumping case and has always received broad support on this issue from tomato growers across the country. This list includes growers in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In fact, U.S. antidumping law requires antidumping petitions to have majority support from the national industry. FTE’s own membership includes companies that produce tomatoes in many different states.

"The Tomato Suspension Agreement should be terminated because it has not met the statutory requirement to protect against unfairly traded Mexican tomatoes, which continue to injure the American tomato industry,” the FTE release said. “This failure requires a legal default to antidumping duties on Mexican tomatoes."

Antidumping duties imposed under U.S. law will not stop market access for Mexican tomatoes, the FTE said in its release; “In fact, the duties would fall to zero if Mexican tomato exporters price their tomatoes fairly, according to the law.”