One EU official pointed out that products such as soybeans and orange juice could easily be sourced from Brazil or Argentina, so consumers would not be hit too hard.
And there was a suggestion that some of the US exports targeted were also from US states under Republican control: soybeans from Louisiana or meat from Nebraska and Kansas.
A relatively large number of US exports enter the EU via the Dutch port of Rotterdam or Antwerp in Belgium.
Dutch Economic Affairs Minister Dirk Beljaarts said nobody stood to benefit from a “tariffs war”, but he was hopeful it would not hit his own country’s economy too hard: “It has an impact on companies and consumers – particularly consumers in the US.”
One area that will be hit especially hard on both sides of the Atlantic is in the drinks sector.
Pauline Bastidon of Spirits Europe said producers in the EU and US stood united, with risks facing European companies that produced US spirits and US companies that were heavily invested in Europe.
Chris Swonger, of the US Distilled Spirits Council, said that in the three years since the suspension of the EU’s earlier 25% tariff on American whiskey, US distillers had “worked hard to regain solid footing in our largest export market”.
Reimposing tariffs from 1 April was “deeply disappointing” and he called for a return to “zero-for-zero” tariffs, external.
For cognac producers in France, the prospect of a 25% US import tax is also a major problem as most of their produce is for export, either to the US or China.
French producers have already been hit by Chinese measures that have slapped heavy taxes on cognac.
“Morale is down in the dumps,” Bastien Brusaferro of the general winegrowers’ union told France Info.
Thousands of jobs are at stake in the Charente region alone, he says: “Cognac is a product that’s made for export.”
There was a dire warning too from the head of the European Steel Association, Henrik Adam.
“President Trump’s ‘America First’ policy threatens to be a final nail in the coffin of the European steel industry,” he warned.
Trump’s initial tariffs on European steel in 2018 saw EU steel exports to the US fall by more than a million tonnes, and for every three tonnes of steel that did not enter the US, two-thirds of it entered the EU instead.
“These new measures imposed by Trump are more extensive, therefore the impact of the US tariffs is likely to be far greater.”
