No instant relief

Jamaican Teas CEO John Mahfood, while welcoming the United States (US) Supreme Court’s decision to strike down tariffs imposed by the Donald Trump administration, has warned that he does not anticipate any immediate impact on Jamaican exports to the US as a result of yesterday’s ruling.

Speaking with The Gleaner yesterday, Mahfood said, “It will probably take the whole of this year before we may begin to see if prices will return to pre-tariff levels.”

The US Supreme Court ruled by a majority of six to three that the tariffs, imposed on countries by the Trump administration utilising the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), were unconstitutional.

According to the court, the IEEPA did not confer on US President Donald Trump the power to impose tariffs across the board.

In April 2025, along with several countries across the world, Jamaica was slapped with a 10 per cent reciprocal tariff applied to its exports to the US.

But in its ruling, the US Supreme Court further determined that Congress did not confer on the president the authority to impose the tariffs and that Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs via a law reserved for national emergencies.

Yesterday, Mahfood, who is also a former president of the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association, said even if the tariffs were ended immediately, distributors and retailers would be unable to immediately roll back prices to pre-tariff levels.

He said that when the 10 per cent tariff was introduced last year on Jamaican exports to the US, and the Jamaican Government was unable to persuade the US Government to not impose the tariff on Jamaican goods, his company, believing that the tax would be temporary, absorbed it for the first three to four months.

“When we became convinced that the tariff was not temporary, we had to increase our prices to distributors and retailers who passed on the higher costs to consumers. This resulted in a slowdown in our sales in our key US marketplaces and it will take us a long time to rebuild sales,” he said.

PRODUCT RANGE

Jamaican Teas product range includes more than 40 different types of teas, instant mixes, a range of pantry items, such as soup mixes and a spring water – Jamaica Blue.

The former JMEA president said he believed the US Government would seek to impose the tariffs through other means – a desire echoed by Trump in his first comments after the court ruling was announced – so it is a game of wait and see.

Trump reacting to the court’s decision, said that he would impose a global tariff of 10 per cent on every country using the 1974 Trade Act. However, such tariffs cannot be in effect for longer than 150 days unless sanction by Congress.

The US president expressed disappointment with the Supreme Court’s decision and berated some of its judges who ruled against his tariff policy.

The president has used tariffs as the central plank of his economic strategy and has argued that the US has already earned some US$130 billion from the taxes.

One question that the court did not address in its decision was whether the administration would have to refund the tariffs already collected.

Mahfood said he did not believe the US should have imposed the 10 per cent tariff on Jamaican exports because Jamaica has a serious trade deficit with the US.

In the meantime Frank James, group CEO of GraceKennedy, one Jamaica’s major exporters to the US, told The Gleaner yesterday that his company was still assessing the Supreme Court decision.

When The Gleaner reached out to representatives of the Jamaican Government for a reaction to the ruling, they indicated that Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade, was the lead voice with whom the matter should be discussed. However, the minister did not respond to calls or text messages sent after yesterday’s sitting of the Senate.

When the tariff on Jamaican goods was first imposed last April, Audrey Marks, then minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, indicated that it would have forced Jamaica to export smarter.

editorial@gleanerjm.com