Last week, the White House declared an emergency under Section 318 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and suspended, for eight months, the collection of anti-dumping and countervailing duties on phosphate fertilizer from the Kingdom of Morocco.
Flip-flopping on tariffs, what else is new, right?
Wrong. These were not the on-again, off-again leverage tariffs America got used to in 2025. The duties cancelled last week were trade remedies — hard won by domestic producers who paid millions to litigate them, and fully authorized under WTO rules. They’re the one category of tariff even the architects of the global trading system bless. Beginning in 2020, domestic fertilizer producers spent years proving to the independent, bipartisan commissioners of the U.S. International Trade Commission that Morocco’s state-owned phosphate monopoly, OCP Group — which controls roughly 68% of the world’s phosphate reserves — was unfairly subsidized by the Kingdom, and that American producers were being injured as a result. They proved their case. There is no political discretion in an AD/CVD case: no President awards these duties. And from the dawn of the GATT era in 1947, up until 2022, no President took them away.
That’s when President Biden stunned the trade community by invoking that same obscure emergency power President Trump just invoked to grant Chinese solar imports a two-year immunity from our AD/CVD laws. Foreign state-owned enterprises took notice: findings of the independent USITC were no longer final — everything was up for grabs politically. Within weeks, Senator Grassley and thirty other GOP lawmakers cited the solar precedent in a letter urging President Biden to set aside the fertilizer duties too, just as Morocco’s state-owned monopoly was paying Covington & Burlingmore than $1 million per month for lawyers, lobbyists, and messaging campaigns aimed at exactly that result.We condemned the Grassley letter at the time.
Consider the message this sends to every domestic producer, in every industry: you can never count on your home market to sustain you. You can invest billions in Florida and Louisiana, petition your government through the byzantine WTO process it created, prove unfair subsidization and injury before independent adjudicators, and win — and then, the moment world prices spike for reasons that have nothing to do with you (a war, a blockaded strait, foreign export controls), your remedy is cancelled by proclamation and you are returned to unfettered price competition with a foreign kingdom’s treasury. Unfair trade findings be damned. Nobody builds new capacity on those terms.
Globalizing Our Farms While Repackaging Biden’s Programs
The fertilizer waiver is not an aberration; it fits the pattern on agriculture. In 2025, the Commerce Department launched Section 232 national security investigations covering a broad swathe of American manufacturing: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, copper, timber, critical minerals, trucks, aircraft, drones, polysilicon, medical supplies, robotics. Twelve new investigations in a single year. Yet not one tariff action has been initiated on a single agricultural import. Florida strawberry growers, finding no love in DC, have resorted to their own anti-dumping petition merely to cover their sales season in the hopes of survival.
What agriculture gets instead is repackaging. In March, Secretary Rollins launched a campaign promoting the “new” voluntary Product of USA beef label as a deliverable of her plan to fortify the beef industry. That labeling rule was finalized in March 2024 by the Biden Administration. On fertilizer, two days after the Morocco waiver, Secretary Rollins announced the $500 million FIELDS program to expand domestic fertilizer production — a rebrand of the Biden Administration’s Fertilizer Production Expansion Program, which committed up to $900 million and invested $517 million across 76 facilities. Grants are fine as far as they go. But we already ran this experiment, and one-off subsidies — without securing the home market — don’t end import reliance. In fact it greatly assures that the subsidies will be wasted, as the subsidized operation will not be sustainable against unfettered imports. Under both administrations the missing piece is the same: no plan to reserve a growing share of the American market for American production.
That’s baffling. A phased-in import quota plan would cost the Treasury nothing. A Section 232 action on fertilizer could use quotas to gradually limit imports as domestic production ramps up, giving producers the certainty they need to invest. Grants ask taxpayers to fund new capacity; quotas simply promise producers that the capacity will have a market. The Administration has now launched over a dozen 232s for manufacturing. Fertilizer — an input in critical short supply — deserves to be the next.
USTR and USDA’s Export Myopia Is Undermining Reshoring
Why does the trade agenda keep working against agricultural self-reliance? Because USTR and USDA still measure success in commodity export volumes. Look at the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade with Indonesia, signed February 19 — nine days before we launched the Iran war that closed the Strait of Hormuz and set off the very energy and fertilizer crisis the White House now cites as its emergency. Annex IV of that agreement commits Indonesia to purchase $15 billion in U.S. energy commodities: $7 billion of refined gasoline, $4.5 billion of crude oil, $3.5 billion of LPG, plus metallurgical coal. Recall that sulfur — which processes phosphate rock into usable fertilizer, at roughly four tons of sulfur for every ten tons of phosphate — is a byproduct of domestic oil and gas processing. So within a matter of days, our government contracted to push billions in energy products abroad, then declared a fertilizer emergency because domestic capacity is “insufficient.” How does that make any sense?
Same question for beef. Annex IV obligates Indonesia to import more than 50,000 metric tons of U.S. beef annually — even as a February proclamation quadrupled Argentina’s import quota, waving an additional 80,000 metric tons of Argentine beef into our own market. It makes no sense. This isn’t food security. It’s churn that globalizes our cattle and beef sector at both ends.
A policy of chasing energy exports was a particularly radical pivot begun by this Administration. The tell came when “Energy Independence” was retired seemingly overnight in favor of “Energy Dominance.” Dominance, it turns out, is the packaging for sending more American fuel abroad — something that was illegal until 2015, because it makes no sense. For forty years, we understood that a nation doesn’t export its own energy security. The export lobby won’t stop until Americans pay what Europeans pay. Less there be any doubt about the globalization intent, the American Petroleum Institute has revealed how thoroughly U.S. Chamber-style globalism runs through its sector: its new American Energy Security Framework attacks tariffs that protect the home market while demanding an ever more “pro-export environment.”
This is why the Food and Farm Policy campaign’s focus on inputs like sulfur matters so much. Every new export terminal bids up the price of oil, gas, and sulfur for the domestic fertilizer producers we have left — and ultimately for the grocery aisle. Russia and China restrict fertilizer and sulfur exports to protect their own food security; we build terminals to ship our advantages away. Rather than lay more export infrastructure, Washington should start talking about export controls on critical fertilizer inputs. What we cannot do is what we did last week: waive the only fair-trade protection domestic fertilizer producers have, while doing everything in our power to raise their input costs.
The emergency is real. The wars disrupting global fertilizer supply are real. But the answer to a global supply emergency is not deeper dependence on the global market — it is a long-term plan for economic self-reliance. Restore the duties. Launch the 232. And give America’s producers what no recent administration has offered them: the certainty that their home market is theirs.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
Cancelling Hard-Won Fertilizer Trade Remedies, the Administration Tells Domestic Producers: Don’t Count On Your Home Market
Last week, the White House declared an emergency under Section 318 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and suspended, for eight months, the collection of anti-dumping and countervailing duties on phosphate fertilizer from the Kingdom of Morocco.
Flip-flopping on tariffs, what else is new, right?
Wrong. These were not the on-again, off-again leverage tariffs America got used to in 2025. The duties cancelled last week were trade remedies — hard won by domestic producers who paid millions to litigate them, and fully authorized under WTO rules. They’re the one category of tariff even the architects of the global trading system bless. Beginning in 2020, domestic fertilizer producers spent years proving to the independent, bipartisan commissioners of the U.S. International Trade Commission that Morocco’s state-owned phosphate monopoly, OCP Group — which controls roughly 68% of the world’s phosphate reserves — was unfairly subsidized by the Kingdom, and that American producers were being injured as a result. They proved their case. There is no political discretion in an AD/CVD case: no President awards these duties. And from the dawn of the GATT era in 1947, up until 2022, no President took them away.
That’s when President Biden stunned the trade community by invoking that same obscure emergency power President Trump just invoked to grant Chinese solar imports a two-year immunity from our AD/CVD laws. Foreign state-owned enterprises took notice: findings of the independent USITC were no longer final — everything was up for grabs politically. Within weeks, Senator Grassley and thirty other GOP lawmakers cited the solar precedent in a letter urging President Biden to set aside the fertilizer duties too, just as Morocco’s state-owned monopoly was paying Covington & Burling more than $1 million per month for lawyers, lobbyists, and messaging campaigns aimed at exactly that result. We condemned the Grassley letter at the time.
Consider the message this sends to every domestic producer, in every industry: you can never count on your home market to sustain you. You can invest billions in Florida and Louisiana, petition your government through the byzantine WTO process it created, prove unfair subsidization and injury before independent adjudicators, and win — and then, the moment world prices spike for reasons that have nothing to do with you (a war, a blockaded strait, foreign export controls), your remedy is cancelled by proclamation and you are returned to unfettered price competition with a foreign kingdom’s treasury. Unfair trade findings be damned. Nobody builds new capacity on those terms.
Globalizing Our Farms While Repackaging Biden’s Programs
The fertilizer waiver is not an aberration; it fits the pattern on agriculture. In 2025, the Commerce Department launched Section 232 national security investigations covering a broad swathe of American manufacturing: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, copper, timber, critical minerals, trucks, aircraft, drones, polysilicon, medical supplies, robotics. Twelve new investigations in a single year. Yet not one tariff action has been initiated on a single agricultural import. Florida strawberry growers, finding no love in DC, have resorted to their own anti-dumping petition merely to cover their sales season in the hopes of survival.
What agriculture gets instead is repackaging. In March, Secretary Rollins launched a campaign promoting the “new” voluntary Product of USA beef label as a deliverable of her plan to fortify the beef industry. That labeling rule was finalized in March 2024 by the Biden Administration. On fertilizer, two days after the Morocco waiver, Secretary Rollins announced the $500 million FIELDS program to expand domestic fertilizer production — a rebrand of the Biden Administration’s Fertilizer Production Expansion Program, which committed up to $900 million and invested $517 million across 76 facilities. Grants are fine as far as they go. But we already ran this experiment, and one-off subsidies — without securing the home market — don’t end import reliance. In fact it greatly assures that the subsidies will be wasted, as the subsidized operation will not be sustainable against unfettered imports. Under both administrations the missing piece is the same: no plan to reserve a growing share of the American market for American production.
That’s baffling. A phased-in import quota plan would cost the Treasury nothing. A Section 232 action on fertilizer could use quotas to gradually limit imports as domestic production ramps up, giving producers the certainty they need to invest. Grants ask taxpayers to fund new capacity; quotas simply promise producers that the capacity will have a market. The Administration has now launched over a dozen 232s for manufacturing. Fertilizer — an input in critical short supply — deserves to be the next.
USTR and USDA’s Export Myopia Is Undermining Reshoring
Why does the trade agenda keep working against agricultural self-reliance? Because USTR and USDA still measure success in commodity export volumes. Look at the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade with Indonesia, signed February 19 — nine days before we launched the Iran war that closed the Strait of Hormuz and set off the very energy and fertilizer crisis the White House now cites as its emergency. Annex IV of that agreement commits Indonesia to purchase $15 billion in U.S. energy commodities: $7 billion of refined gasoline, $4.5 billion of crude oil, $3.5 billion of LPG, plus metallurgical coal. Recall that sulfur — which processes phosphate rock into usable fertilizer, at roughly four tons of sulfur for every ten tons of phosphate — is a byproduct of domestic oil and gas processing. So within a matter of days, our government contracted to push billions in energy products abroad, then declared a fertilizer emergency because domestic capacity is “insufficient.” How does that make any sense?
Same question for beef. Annex IV obligates Indonesia to import more than 50,000 metric tons of U.S. beef annually — even as a February proclamation quadrupled Argentina’s import quota, waving an additional 80,000 metric tons of Argentine beef into our own market. It makes no sense. This isn’t food security. It’s churn that globalizes our cattle and beef sector at both ends.
A policy of chasing energy exports was a particularly radical pivot begun by this Administration. The tell came when “Energy Independence” was retired seemingly overnight in favor of “Energy Dominance.” Dominance, it turns out, is the packaging for sending more American fuel abroad — something that was illegal until 2015, because it makes no sense. For forty years, we understood that a nation doesn’t export its own energy security. The export lobby won’t stop until Americans pay what Europeans pay. Less there be any doubt about the globalization intent, the American Petroleum Institute has revealed how thoroughly U.S. Chamber-style globalism runs through its sector: its new American Energy Security Framework attacks tariffs that protect the home market while demanding an ever more “pro-export environment.”
This is why the Food and Farm Policy campaign’s focus on inputs like sulfur matters so much. Every new export terminal bids up the price of oil, gas, and sulfur for the domestic fertilizer producers we have left — and ultimately for the grocery aisle. Russia and China restrict fertilizer and sulfur exports to protect their own food security; we build terminals to ship our advantages away. Rather than lay more export infrastructure, Washington should start talking about export controls on critical fertilizer inputs. What we cannot do is what we did last week: waive the only fair-trade protection domestic fertilizer producers have, while doing everything in our power to raise their input costs.
The emergency is real. The wars disrupting global fertilizer supply are real. But the answer to a global supply emergency is not deeper dependence on the global market — it is a long-term plan for economic self-reliance. Restore the duties. Launch the 232. And give America’s producers what no recent administration has offered them: the certainty that their home market is theirs.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
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