New U.S. tariffs targeting countries worldwide undermine global trade and multilateralism, while harming American consumers and the economy, officials and experts from South Africa and Bangladesh warned Tuesday.
The U.S. will impose 30-percent tariffs on South Africa starting August 1, a move South Africa's Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, called harmful to American consumers during his interview with China Central Television (CCTV) in Cape Town.
"The big losers will be the workers in the automotive sector and the agricultural sector and other sectors that lose work as a result of factory closures. And I also think the other losers are American consumers who benefit from really well-priced good quality South African agricultural products. They're now not going to have access to those goods if this current tariff stands. I certainly think that these tariffs have upended the world's trade operations and have caused significant uncertainty in many parts of the world. And South Africa's not excluded from that," he said.
Steenhuisen further emphasized the global consequences of such tariffs, adding that the uncertainty created has rippled through economies dependent on fair trade.
In another CCTV interview in Johannesburg, Patrick Bond, a political economist and expert on international relations at the Department of Sociology with University of Johannesburg, said high tariffs are not the right answer to the U.S. economy.
"The logic behind higher tariffs is simple from Trump's standpoint that if he can make more goods in the United States because it's more expensive to import them and then because there's going to inflation when there are imports, he's lowering the price of the dollar. So, he's offsetting that. That's his idea, it won't work," he said.
Mahmud Titumir, a professor of economics at the Department of Development Studies of University of Dhaka, also criticized the U.S. approach, calling it detrimental to global prosperity.
"But this is a fringe of multilateralism and going backward. The U.S. has been imposing something out of which they would not benefit because their consumers would not benefit. The U.S. should promote as has been the case of globalization, which the U.S. is the largest beneficiary. Reversing back to protectionism would not only hurt its consumers, but it would have a reduction in global trade flow," he said.
US tariffs to upend global trade, hurt consumers: experts
