Commerce Department: Mexico is Dumping Tomatoes in the U.S.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it found Mexico is guilty of dumping tomatoes into the United States. Commerce says the preliminary dumping margin is just over 25 percent. The announcement refutes the Mexican claim that the data that they submitted to the Department of Commerce will prove that it’s not dumping the produce into the U.S. The evidence that Mexico is dumping tomatoes into the United States isn’t exactly surprising to U.S. tomato growers, who say they’ve had to compete against unfairly dumped Mexican imports. The Florida Tomato Exchange says the U.S. industry is looking forward to the chance to show the U.S. International Trade Commission that it has suffered economic damage by the rising amounts of unfairly traded Mexican imports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says tomato imports have swamped U.S. markets, increasing from just 20 percent of the market in 1994 up to 60 percent as recently as 2017. Mexican tomatoes account for 90 percent of that rise in imports. Meanwhile, the market share for U.S. farmers has dropped by half, going from 80 percent down to 40 percent, all while hundreds of growers have gone out of business.