Trump Declares National Emergency To Suspend Fertilizer Tariffs, Conceding For Eight Months That The Word He Calls The Most Beautiful In The Dictionary Makes It More Expensive To Grow Food

WASHINGTON. Citing a grave and unforeseeable threat to the nation's food supply, President Trump on Monday signed a proclamation declaring a national emergency over the price and availability of fertilizer and authorizing the duty-free importation of phosphate fertilizer from the Kingdom of Morocco for up to eight months, a crisis that administration officials traced to forces entirely beyond the President's control and that everyone else traced to the President.

To address the emergency, Mr. Trump invoked Section 318 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a Depression-era provision written to let the government rush food, clothing, and medical supplies into disaster zones without stopping to collect customs duties. The administration determined that phosphate fertilizer, a substance American farmers apply on a fixed annual schedule and have applied every year for over a century, now belongs in the same legal category as bandages airlifted to an earthquake.

The duties the proclamation suspends are the antidumping and countervailing tariffs that the United States itself placed on Moroccan phosphate, which is to say that the emergency Mr. Trump declared on Monday was an emergency Mr. Trump was authorized to end at any time simply by ending it. A President who has spent his term declaring emergencies in order to impose tariffs has now declared one in order to remove them, an act the White House fact sheet celebrated as delivering a 22 percent drop in phosphate prices and $1.82 billion in annual savings, figures that also happen to describe the amount the tariffs had been adding all along.

The man who once branded himself "Tariff Man" and called tariff "the most beautiful word in the dictionary" offered no comment on the document quietly conceding that the word makes it more expensive to feed the country, and that the concession expires in eight months. "This was a totally unpredictable shock to the fertilizer supply chain, predictable only to anyone who understands that a tax on a thing raises the price of the thing," said one source within the administration, who added that the President remained fully committed to tariffs in every sector where the cost was being paid by someone other than a farmer in a swing state.

Chief among the foreign beneficiaries is Morocco's state-owned phosphate monopoly, which now enjoys eight months of toll-free entry into the American market, including rock mined in Western Sahara, the occupied territory that Mr. Trump in 2020 became the first world leader to recognize as Moroccan. The arrangement leaves domestic fertilizer producers, who had petitioned for the duties in the first place, to compete against the foreign supplier their own government has just waved through the gate.

At press time, the President was said to be weighing a second emergency declaration to address the rising cost of every other good still subject to his tariffs.