US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs of at least 10% on goods entering the US on 185 countries on his ‘Liberation Day’ on Wednesday, the 2nd of April. However, Trump has also turned the global trade war on some unlikely rivals – including remote islands where there are more penguins than people, according to Politico and Reuters.
The US tariff list includes Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, Australian territories in the vast Indian Ocean between Africa and Antarctica
The list also includes the small island of Norfolk in the South Pacific and an uninhabited place in the Arctic Ocean, Jan Mayen, which is part of Norwegian territory, together with the Svalbard islands near the North Pole.
The ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on goods imported into the US have caused headaches around the world, with leaders analysing Trump’s efforts to punish countries that he claims have exploited US trade policies to steal American jobs.
“I’m not entirely convinced that Norfolk Island is, in that respect, a trade competitor to the huge US economy, but it just demonstrates and illustrates the fact that no region of the globe is exempt from this,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Having such unknown territories on the list would seem to undermine Trump’s tariff argument that other countries have taken advantage of the US and should therefore be punished. But the White House said that Norfolk, as well as Heard and Macdonald Islands, are on the list because they are Australian territories.
HOWEVER, THE WHITE HOUSE’S LIST WAS EQUALLY PUZZLING TO MANY PEOPLE.
The list included the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is a collection of largely uninhabited islands with no permanent inhabitants – with the exception of the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia.
Svalbard has just under 3 000 inhabitants and Jan Mayen is uninhabited except for 18 people temporarily employed by the Norwegian military and meteorological services.
Similarly, the island of Tokelau, close to New Zealand, with less than 2 000 inhabitants, will be subject to tariffs.
But on Heard and Macdonald, literally no one will be affected by the tariffs because no one lives there. Both islands are considered uninhabited, have large penguin populations and are recognised by the Australian government as “one of the least anthropogenically impacted areas in the world”. Despite this, a minimum tariff of 10% was applied to both.
Lesotho, which Trump said “nobody had ever heard of”, received the most stringent tariff. The White House said that the landlocked African kingdom has its own tariffs of 99% and so the US will apply a 50% tariff on products from that country.
ALSO, POPULATED COUNTRIES AND CLOSE ALLIES WERE NOT SPARED.
China, the world’s second largest economy, has been slapped with a 34% tariff on top of the 20% tariff previously imposed by Trump.
Close allies such as Japan and the European Union were not spared, as they were subject to tariffs of 24% and 20% respectively.
On the other hand, Canada and Mexico, the two largest trading partners of the US, already have 25% tariffs imposed on many imported goods, and no additional duties were applied in Wednesday’s announcement.
However, the Trump administration has not included Russia in the broad list of countries that will be subject to the new high tariffs. Ukraine was subject to a 10% base rate, which will come into force o the 5th of April.