Why Food Tariffs Are Universal

The persistence of agricultural protection in a globalized world

Earlier this year, the United States began levying tariffs on its trading partners. Canada and Mexico got the first wave, on particular goods like aluminum. There have been many subsequent waves, with tariffs added, then removed, then added on all kinds of goods from many different places. It’s too much to keep up with; here’s a recent explainer on where we are now.

The commentary on these tariffs—some baffled, some exasperated—has emphasized that the USA has represented its tariffs as reciprocal, a response to tariff walls maintained by other countries; but that these representations are inaccurate. For the most part, tariff barriers around the world are low, even negligible.

But these explainers also note that this is only true for non-edible goods.

This got me curious. Why should this be so?

The first thing I did was to check if it’s true that food tariffs are common. And the answer is that yes, it’s true. Nearly every country in the world imposes import duties on food, and that's always been the case. In a world that had (until 2025) largely embraced free trade, food was the great exception. The WTO’s World Tariff Profiles 2024 shows an average tariff for agricultural to non-agricultural goods 2:1, with agricultural tariffs on at least some products at an average of ~10% in almost every country in the world.¹ Even nations otherwise committed to free trade maintain agricultural protection: the European Union applies a nominal tariff rate of 20% on raw sugar (estimated as actually being much higher) and over 50% on many poultry products from outside the bloc, while CUSMA protects Canadian dairy and American peanuts from competition from elsewhere in North America.² Only a very few places have eliminated food tariffs completely.

There's a puzzle here. Agriculture is an economic sector, and in that sense, it’s like all the others: it combines land, labour, capital, and knowledge into products for sale. So why does everyone put tariffs on food imports, while smartphones, sneakers, and steel cross freely (or, at least, used to)?

There seem to be two reasons for this.