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IPFS News Link • Free Trade

There Are No Tariffs on Coffee. Care to Guess Why?

• fee.org by James Devereaux

Here's one that he posed to me recently by e-mail:

Don:

I don't think there are tariffs on coffee and I know of no organization calling for coffee tariffs. I wonder why.

Great, probing question.

The answer is that there are very few coffee growers in the United States. In the U.S. states, coffee is grown commercially only in Hawaii.  Coffee is also grown commercially also in Puerto Rico.  The result of this small number of American coffee growers is that these growers are too small in number to form a powerful-enough interest group.  But, of course, coffee is consumed massively throughout the U.S.  (I'm drinking some right now, by the way.  It's from Guatemala.  Yum!)  The pain to consumers caused by restrictions on coffee imports would be too great relative to the gains to American coffee growers; politically it would be a bad move for most members of Congress to support protective tariffs on coffee.


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