Arkansas business owners say new tariffs on imported goods have upended their operations.
The group Farmers for Free Trade held a panel discussion on the topic in North Little Rock on Tuesday.
Steve Jenkins is owner of Jenkins Enterprises, which imports products from China and re-brands them with logos of sports teams and military branches. He says his costs have more than doubled since the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on imported goods, complicating things for his roughly 70 employees.
“All of our people are dependent upon this product that’s coming from China. And people will say to me, ‘Why don’t you just buy it in America?’ Because those products are no longer made in America,” he said. “We don’t have enough people to do it. We have a population of about 320-something million people. China has a population of 1.6 billion.”
The Trump administration has said the tariffs are necessary in order to boost domestic manufacturing in the U.S. But UA Little Rock economist Michael Pakko says the uncertainty surrounding tariffs doesn’t help make the country attractive to potential investors.
“If you’re going to persuade businesses to invest billions of dollars into new equipment, plants, facilities to manufacture things in the U.S., there has to be some expectation that that return [on investment] was going to be there, and not next week or in six weeks or 90 days or whatever, but that the landscape will be such that you can make a profit going forward years from now,” Pakko said.
Tariffs have also hit Arkansas’ agriculture industry particularly hard. Soybean exports from the U.S. to China were cut in half from January to April, the lowest level since 2020.
State Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, criticized the tariffs, but fell short of criticizing the president.
“I’m not going to disparage what he’s doing because I’m going to live through it, but I’ll tell you this much, as a producer: between 20% and 30% of the producers in the United States would be out if this doesn’t change between now and December,” he said. “There is nobody to backfill us, I think the average farmer in the United States is 58 years old.”
Johnson is a farmer himself, and said he’s counting on proposed lower income tax rates to help make up for losses. Commodity prices have also fallen drastically, meaning growers are paying more for things like fertilizer and equipment, but getting less for their product.
The discussion was part of a national tour of panels held by the nonprofit Farmers for Free Trade. A report by the group finds tariffs on imports into Arkansas grew by 155%, or $27 million, over the past year.
According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate for the U.S. is just under 16%, the highest since 1938.
