By: Staff Writer
July 18, 2025
The Donald Trump administration is implementing a 10 percent tariff on the Caribbean and with African countries.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that: “We’ll probably set one tariff for all of them,” adding that it could be “a little over 10 percent tariff” on goods from at least 100 nations.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick interjected that the nations with goods being taxed at these rates would be in Africa and the Caribbean, places that generally do relatively modest levels of trade with the U.S. and would be relatively insignificant for addressing Trump’s goals of reducing trade imbalances with the rest of the world.
Caribbean seafood exports are most at risk along with small textile manufacturers. The Trump administration had implemented a 10 percent tariff on Caribbean countries earlier this year.
In 2022, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) exported $578 billion worth of goods to the United States, representing 41.71 percent of their total exports. A significant portion of these exports are crude petroleum and petroleum gas, along with gold. The US is a major trading partner for the Caribbean, with substantial trade flow between the two regions.
Trump had this month been posting letters to roughly two dozen countries and the European Union that simply levied a tariff rate to be charged starting Aug. 1.
Those countries generally faced tax rates on the goods close to the April 2 rates announced by the U.S. president, whose rollout of historically high import taxes for the U.S. caused financial markets to panic and led to Trump setting a 90-day negotiating period that expired July 9.
How this latest announcement from the US would affect the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) is yet to be seen.
The CBI is a trade program, established by the U.S. in 1983, designed to promote economic development in the Caribbean region. It primarily provides beneficiary countries with duty-free access to the U.S. market for certain goods, aiming to foster economic growth and diversification. The CBI was initially launched under the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) and has been expanded through subsequent legislation, including the U.S.-Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA).