Saving American Cannery

On April 7, the Del Monte cannery in Modesto, California, ran its last can. Del Monte had filed for bankruptcy in July 2025; the grower cooperative that bought the fruit business could not absorb the volume, and said so. Roughly 600 full-time and 1,200 seasonal jobs are gone. The plant had been the processing home for about a third of California’s cling peach crop, and more than two hundred family growers in Sutter County are now holding orchards with no buyer, facing losses estimated above $550 million. Cling peaches have no fresh market. They exist to be canned. When the cannery dies, the orchard dies with it.

Imported filled peach cans now hold roughly half the American canned peach market, up from 16 percent in 2012. Across the tariff lines covering the canned foods America grows and packs in quantity — tomatoes, corn, peas, beans, mushrooms, peaches, pears, tuna, salmon — imports have nearly doubled since 2018, from $1.6 billion to $3.2 billion a year. Not every dollar under those lines ships in a steel can — some is glass and pouch, which the proclamation’s metal-content rule would automatically exempt — and the list omits dozens more canned-food lines besides. Count it any way you like; the direction and the speed are the same. Thailand’s shipments are up 118 percent over that period. Italy’s are up 396 percent. Greece’s are up 301 percent. Egypt’s are up twenty-fold, and one bargain chain now stocks Egyptian tomato sauce in nearly 21,000 American stores, having switched away from a family-owned American producer that had supplied it for generations. This is not a trend. It is a liquidation.

And the perverse part is that the United States tariff system is driving it for want of two sign-offs, from the U.S. Department of Commerce and USTR respectively.

Currently, the Section 232 Steel action tariffs imported tin mill steel — the tinplate a food can is made from — at 50 percent. But fill that same can with peaches in Greece or corn in Thailand, and it enters the United States with a Section 232 duty of zero. This is called tariff inversion. In the first five months of 2026, imports of tin mill steel collapsed 44.5 percent while imports of filled canned food rose — up 10.3 percent in April and May, the first two months under the President’s new metals proclamation. We put a tariff on what the American canner buys and none on what his overseas competitor exports here. That is not a tariff protecting an industry. That is a tariff exporting one.

It did not used to be this way, and the history is worth knowing, because the tinplate can is one of the protective tariff’s most famous children. In 1890 the United States produced essentially no tinplate; Wales produced it all, and the free-traders swore America never could. William McKinley put a duty on it anyway, took the abuse — he lost his own seat in the 1890 wipeout — and within a generation the United States was the largest tinplate producer on earth. The American can, the American cannery, and the American canned-food aisle were built behind that wall and fed this country through two world wars. Today domestic tin mill production is down to the last few lines, canmakers have no choice but to import nearly 80 percent of their tinplate steel — not to save money, but because there is nowhere near enough made in America to fill their orders —  and the reason is not that McKinley was wrong. It is that we kept his tariff on the steel while conceding the market for everything made from it.

Protect the input, surrender the product, and the input dies too — there is no one left to sell to.

Nothing new or novel needs to be done to correct this. In 1929, the tomato growers and canners came to the House Ways and Means Committee with a record that could be filed today with the country names swapped: canned tomato imports up tenfold in five years; Italian exporters underselling equal-quality American product; the Italian government refusing to let U.S. Tariff Commission cost investigators into the country; American farmers selling raw tomatoes below the cost of production. The cost evidence pointed to duties of 56 to 60 percent.

The committee did not flinch, and it understood the form-shifting game cold. Warned that taxing tomato paste but not canned tomatoes would simply re-route the imports from one form to the other, John Nance Garner of Texas — ranking Democrat, future Speaker, future Vice President — reduced the whole question to one sentence: whether the tomato “is brought in its raw, original state or in the form of paste or canned tomato, just to the extent that they are brought into this country they displace the farmer’s tomato produced in this country.” Frank Crowther, Republican of New York, answered from the other side of the aisle: “there is no question but what the duty on canned tomatoes ought to be raised. The canning industry is nearly put out of business in some sections of the country by importations.” Congress wrote 50 percent on canned tomatoes and tomato paste into the Tariff Act of 1930.

Nor was tomatoes a one-off. In 1929, Maine’s sardine industry rolled its own cans — of the 6,500 people on its payrolls, 600 worked in the can-making plants, spread across twenty coastal towns where “sardine packing is the only industry, so that the entire population depends upon it.” When Robert J. Peacock of Lubec appeared before the committee on behalf of “the entire canning industry of the State of Maine,” he asked Congress for precisely 50 percent on the filled sardine can.

Likewise, the Kennett Square mushroom growers asked for protection against imported canned mushrooms that had fallen from 34 cents a pound to 19; Congress delivered, and their institutional descendant, the American Mushroom Institute of Kennett Square, is a signatory of the canned food coalition letter ninety-seven years later. The industries that got protection are still here to ask for it. The ones that were refused are the ones we now import. Can plant and cannery were a single payroll then; they are a single fate now, asking for the same 50 percent. 

If we had it figured out back then, what happened? The great unwinding: the 1934 transfer of tariff authority from Congress to the President handed the tariff pen to an anti-tariff zealot, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the postwar agreements traded the canned-food schedule away line by line, decade by decade. Individual producers held on as best they could until the last ten years, when subsidized foreign steel, subsidized foreign packs, and finally our own inverted tariff structure began carrying it out one cannery at a time. Modesto is not an anecdote. It is the latest victim in an industry that hasn’t had sensible tariff treatment in almost a century.

Here is what is different now, though: the tariff remedy is already primed, ready for execution. The President’s April 2 proclamation gave the Commerce Secretary and the U.S. Trade Representative standing joint authority to add derivative products to the metals tariffs, effective on publication, and it names exactly one example of what the authority reaches: “This authority shall allow metal containers to be included in the scope of the metal tariffs, even if they are filled with items that will not be subject to steel, aluminum, or copper tariffs.” Filled cans are not a stretch of that authority. They are its stated purpose. No hearings required, no new statute, no waiting on Congress. Two signatures.

The rate question answers itself twice over — once in law, once in arithmetic. In law: the proclamation assigns new inclusions the full 50 percent rate whenever “identical or substantially comparable articles” already sit on the 50 percent list, and the steel food can itself sits on that list. Every imported can of peaches contains, article for article, a product the United States already taxes at 50 percent. The only thing shielding it is the peaches.

In arithmetic: run the cost-equalization test the 1929 tariff-writers ran, on 2025 Census data. A Chinese can of sweet corn enters this country at a customs value of about 25 cents. A Thai can, about 34 cents. The American can — American corn, American labor, in a can made from steel carrying a 50 percent tariff — costs a retailer about 70 cents. Full equalization against China would take a duty above 180 percent. Against Thailand, above 100 percent. A 50 percent duty moves the Chinese can from 25 cents to 37 — still barely half the American price. Fifty is not the aggressive number. It is the restrained one, exactly as it was in 1930, when the evidence said 56 to 60 and Congress wrote 50.

And 50 has a property no lower number offers: it is the rate the rest of the can already pays. Price the steel, the empty can, and the filled can at the same 50 percent, and no stage of the value chain is favored, no form of the product is worth gaming at the border, and the century-old Garner principle is finally honored — the tariff follows the product, not the packaging. At today’s rates the arithmetic runs backward: taxing the canner’s input while exempting his competitor’s output works out to a negative effective tariff on American canning — our tariff schedule, run through a calculator, is a subsidy to foreign canneries. Even 25 percent would leave canning the least-protected stage of its own supply chain. Uniformity is the cure, and fifty is uniformity.

The objection will be groceries, so look at a grocery shelf. Kroger sells the Chinese can of sliced peaches and the American can side by side at the identical $2.99. Retailers price to the domestic market and pocket the import spread; the duty comes out of that spread, not out of the consumer. Even at 50 percent the imported corn can still undersells the American one — nothing leaves the shelf. What raises canned food prices is not a tariff. It is what comes after the last domestic cannery closes, when the importers who priced low to kill it no longer have anyone to undersell. Ask Sutter County.

The Supreme Court’s termination of the IEEPA tariffs in February settled any remaining question about half-measures: since then, imported canned food has entered at single-digit MFN rates, and the import surge accelerated. Low rates are not untested. They are tested and refuted. Ambassador Greer and Secretary Lutnick have the signed authority, the Census record, and a coalition of thirty-four organizations — steelmakers to can makers to farm bureaus to mushroom growers — asking them to use it before this fall’s pack-season contracts convert to import supply that will not convert back.

The choice is the same one the 51st Congress faced in 1890 and the 71st faced in 1930, and it is not a choice between free trade and protection. It is between finishing the wall — the same 50 percent on the steel, the can, and the can of peaches — and keeping a tariff structure that taxes American production and calls itself protection while foreign cans carry the market away. McKinley’s generation built the American can. Garner’s generation defended what went in it. This one has to do nothing braver than sign its name.

A 50 percent duty on imported canned food is not an innovation. It is a restoration — of a settled American rate, for a settled American reason, against the same scheme run under new flags. The wall is built and paid for. Close the door.