(CNN) — The United States Commerce Department is poised to significantly reduce the tariffs set to take effect on over a dozen Italian pasta makers’ products later this year.
Most products from the European Union are already subject to tariffs of at least 15%. The pasta-specific tariffs, initially proposed in October at 92%, would have subject Italian pasta to a total rate of 107%. The newly announced rates would put the levies between 24% and 29%.
The final rates, set to be announced on March 12 the Commerce Department said in a post-preliminary report published Wednesday, stem from an investigation some producers sold pasta at unfairly low prices. The decision to recommend lower rates before then results from an “evaluation of additional comments received following a preliminary determination,” a Commerce official told CNN.
“Italian pasta makers have addressed many of Commerce’s concerns raised in the preliminary determination, and reflects Commerce’s commitment to a fair, transparent process,” the official added.
The potential tariffs, which impact 13 Italian pasta makers, are due to an antidumping complaint two American companies filed with the US Commerce Department last July. In the complaint, two Midwestern companies, 8th Avenue Food & Provisions and Winland Foods, alleged that several Italian companies underpriced pasta that was shipped to the United States.
The preliminary investigation published by the Commerce Department in September stated that two companies, La Molisana and Pastificio Lucio Garofalo, made sales to the United States “at less than normal value.” It also said both were “uncooperative” during the investigation and provided “incomplete and unreliable” data.
The two companies accounted for the largest volume of pasta sales to the United States, according to the department. Neither immediately responded to CNN’s request for comment.
“The redetermination of the tariffs is a sign of the recognition by US authorities of our companies’ willingness to cooperate,” the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.
President Trump’s plan to import Argentine beef to drive down prices has cattle ranchers worried.
Beccy Tanner
McClatchy
President Trump is facing backlash from some cattle raisers after suggesting the U.S. could import Argentine beef to drive down domestic beef prices.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Oct. 19, Trump said “the only price we have that’s high is beef,” before saying the administration is considering bringing in more beef from Argentina to combat rising consumer costs.
Year to date, the U.S. has already imported more than 30,000 metric tons of beef from Argentina.
Following Trump’s announcement, legislators from beef-producing states like North Dakota, Nebraska and Oklahoma urged the president to consider the impact on cattle ranchers.
The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association put out a statement on Oct. 22 opposing the import of Argentine beef.
“While we appreciate the Trump administration’s ongoing support for ranchers and landowners,” the statement read, “we strongly oppose the proposal to increase beef imports from Argentina.”
The statement went on to warn that foot-and-mouth disease is a concern with Argentine beef. The highly contagious disease, which was eradicated in the U.S. in 1929, causes painful blisters and sores on cattle and can leave them weakened. Adult cattle can generally recover, but foot-and-mouth can be fatal in younger animals.
As reported by Newsweek, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who is from Glen Rose, acknowledged the risk of foot-and-mouth disease in Argentine beef. The same report, however, cited a study published by the World Reference Laboratory for Foot-and-Mouth Disease that shows Argentina hasn’t had a foot-and-mouth outbreak since 2006.
A rancher’s perspective
Media pundits and legislators have weighed in on the president’s plan, but what are ranchers saying?
Bronson Corn is a 2006 graduate of TCU’s School of Ranch Management and the president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association. Speaking to the Star-Telegram, he said he understood the position President Trump is in trying to balance consumer interests with those of cattle ranchers. But like others, Corn said increasing beef imports isn’t the solution.
The worry, he said, was that too much imported beef could flood the U.S. market. In recent decades, Corn said, cattle ranchers have struggled to turn a profit, and an oversaturation of foreign beef could drive many out of the business altogether, which could affect our food security long term.
The Corn family is heavily invested in sheep as well as cattle. Corn said a trade deal put in place years ago to import more lamb devastated U.S. sheep ranchers. He doesn’t want that to happen with cattle.
“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, there were around 8 million sheep in New Mexico,” Corn said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find 20,000 in the state now.”
Like others, Corn mentioned the danger of potentially importing beef infected with foot-and-mouth disease, as well as the risk of opening the door to New World screwworm, a dangerous, sometimes deadly, pest that afflicts livestock.
Is beef really the only thing that’s still expensive?
Trump said beef prices are the only ones that are high, but consumer price index data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that grocery prices in general have steadily risen since January 2024, with only a temporary dip in April of this year.
Looking at staple grocery items, bread and egg prices have fallen since January, but the price of rice has gone up since then, and prices for milk and chicken remain high.
Beef prices began climbing in 2024, driven by high demand and the lowest supply of beef cattle this country has seen in 50 years.
In August, the average price per pound of ground beef was around $6.32. Ground chuck was around $6.63 a pound. Steaks averaged more than $12 a pound.
Are ranchers benefitting from pricey beef and tariffs?
In its statement on Argentine beef, the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association said importing beef “undermines efforts to stabilize the market through natural herd rebuilding.”
One of the biggest reasons the U.S. beef herd is near an all-time low number is because of ongoing drought conditions in beef-producing states. Much of Texas has been in drought conditions for the last 25 years.
An August report from Texas A&M AgriLife said the herd size will likely remain small for the foreseeable future, meaning prices will remain high barring a change in demand.
Corn said 2025 has been a rare good year for cattle raisers. Higher beef prices along with more rain and lower feed costs means ranchers are making money. After years of struggling, cattle raisers are paying off debt and building out their operational infrastructures. But it only takes one bad year for it all to come crashing back down.
“Five years ago, production costs were about $1,200 per head (of cattle),” Corn said. “That was your land costs, feed costs, insurance, everything you need to be able to operate. And I was selling calves at $950 a head. If you can have a break-even year, you’re doing OK. If you make $50 a head, you’re doing good.”
Corn said Americans are fortunate in that they only spend about 10% of their annual income on food. That is far lower than in many other countries. He believes Americans may need to get more comfortable with higher food prices, which could help ensure a thriving American agricultural industry.
Regardless, Corn said, we shouldn’t look to other countries to supplement our food supply. Instead, he said we should continue investing in efficiencies that have allowed cattle raisers to produce more beef even as the herd size has declined. It also wouldn’t hurt to pray for rain.
“The answer isn’t imports. It’s making it so the cattle industry is able to rebuild infrastructure. And if the good Lord will provide us with some rain like we had this year, the cattle inventory issues will change.”
During his Oct. 19 remarks to reporters, Trump said the U.S. would only import a limited amount of beef from Argentina.
“If we buy some beef, I’m not talking about that much, from Argentina, it would help Argentina, which we consider a very good country, a good ally,” he said.
After getting pushback to his plan, Trump said his trade policies have been good for cattle raisers, and that they “don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put tariffs on cattle coming into the United States.”
The price of beef has been rising for years, and it took a sharp upward turn in 2021. In April, at the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association’s Cattle Raisers Convention and Expo 2025, a beef market analyst from CattleFax warned ranchers that Trump’s higher tariffs could have an adverse impact on their profits, despite likely leading to less imported beef.
The analyst said the trade war between the U.S. and China could hurt ranchers. The U.S. exports upward of 500 million pounds of beef each year to China, and that export business is in jeopardy with the two nations applying punitive tariffs to each other’s goods.
Corn said beef imports have fallen as a result of the tariffs, but not as dramatically as people might think. Tariffs haven’t impacted the import of Canadian beef, for example, because the U.S. is Canada’s biggest beef buyer, Corn said. The tariffs have just made that beef cost more. The U.S. also still imports a significant amount of beef from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Brazil, despite higher tariffs.
This story was originally published October 24, 2025 at 11:31 AM.
Matt Adams is a news reporter covering Fort Worth, Tarrant County and surrounding areas. He previously wrote about aviation and travel and enjoys a good weekend road trip. Matt joined the Star-Telegram in January 2025.
(CNN) — President Donald Trump announced Thursday that brand-name or patented pharmaceutical products will be subject to a 100% tariff starting October 1 – unless the drugmaker is building a manufacturing plant in the US.
Trump has been promising for months to levy tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, which avoided tariffs during his first term. The president sees tariffs as a way to pressure drug manufacturers to ramp up production in the US and to strengthen the supply chain for essential medicines.
Also, Trump has pointed to tariffs as a way to fulfill his vow to lower drug costs, though experts say that is unlikely to happen.
Drugmakers have taken Trump’s tariff threats seriously, unveiling hundreds of billions of dollars of commitments to build or expand US manufacturing operations in the coming years. Just this week Eli Lilly announced it would construct a $6.5 billion manufacturing facility in Houston, shortly after saying it would build a $5 billion plant outside of Richmond, Virginia.
Trump indicated in a Truth Social post Thursday what would be needed to avoid the tariffs.
“‘IS BUILDING’ will be defined as, ‘breaking ground’ and/or ‘under construction,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “There will, therefore, be no Tariff on these Pharmaceutical Products if construction has started.”
The White House told CNN on Friday that “companies that are in the process of setting up manufacturing for a pharma product in the U.S. will not be subject to tariffs on that specific product until plant construction, etc. is completed.” That exemption will apply to projects that predate the Trump administration.
Several industry analysts downplayed the impact of the announcement on drugmakers but noted that Trump’s post raises many questions.
“The actual comment from the President is direct but its impact may be somewhere between nebulous and negligible,” Jared Holz, an analyst with Mizuho, said in a note to clients. “All major players have some production presence domestically and almost all have announced increased investment directly tied towards local manufacturing.”
The tariffs should not affect many larger pharmaceutical companies because they have construction projects underway, David Risinger, an analyst with Leerink Partners, wrote in a note to clients. But it is difficult to know which smaller manufacturers may face exposure.
That’s likely why most major foreign drug manufacturer stocks were not roiled on Friday, following Trump’s announcement. European drugmakers AstraZeneca (AZN), GSK (GSK), Novartis (NVS) and Sanofi (SNY), all of which are building or have plans to build US factories, closed higher on Friday, while Novo Nordisk (NVO) closed down slightly. But drugmakers Alibaba Health, Chugai, Daiichi, JD Health, Samsung Biologics, Sankyo, Sankyo and WuXi AppTec fell somewhat more substantially on Asian stock exchanges, even though they may be exempt from the tariffs or make up a relatively insignificant portion of the US market.
A leading pharmaceutical industry association warned that medicines have previously been exempt from tariffs because of increased cost and shortage concerns.
“PhRMA companies continue to announce hundreds of billions in new US investments thanks to President Trump’s pro-growth tax and regulatory policies,” Alex Schriver, senior vice president at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, said in a statement.
“Tariffs risk those plans because every dollar spent on tariffs is a dollar that cannot be invested in American manufacturing or the development of future treatments and cures.”
Global manufacturing
The pharma companies’ moves are not expected to decrease the United States’ reliance on foreign sources for key pharmaceutical ingredients and drugs, experts say. The pharmaceutical industry is a global web, with ingredients and finished drugs being manufactured in a multitude of locations around the world.
These products may have also seen “significant” stockpiling by US importers this year as the companies braced for the expected tariffs, which should soften the new levies’ impact, said Neil Shearing, chief economist at consultancy Capital Economics. Those cheaper inventories will be eventually run down, however.
The impact on exporting countries is likely to be relatively limited too, Shearing wrote in a note Friday. The countries most reliant on pharmaceutical exports to the US are in the European Union, he noted, while in July Trump announced a much lower, 15% levy on most imports from the 27-nation bloc, including pharmaceuticals, with exemptions for generic drugs.
The lower tariff should still apply, according to the EU. “This clear all-inclusive 15% tariff ceiling for EU exports represents an insurance policy that no higher tariffs will emerge for European economic operators,” a European Commission spokesperson told CNN Friday. “The EU is the only trade partner to achieve this outcome with the US.”
The White House confirmed Friday that it will honor the 15% tariff cap it agreed to in its trade deals with the European Union and Japan.
Notably, Trump did not mention Thursday levying tariffs on generic pharmaceutical imports, which experts have said could worsen drug shortages. Generic drugmakers have much thinner profit margins, which would make it much more difficult for them to absorb tariffs. Instead, they may opt to stop selling their products in the US.
India, for example, is spared for now, given that its pharmaceutical exports concentrate on generics, even though it supplies nearly 47% of the required pharmaceuticals in the US, according to Namit Joshi, chairman of the Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council of India.
The proposed tariff is “unlikely to have an immediate impact on Indian exports, as the bulk of our contribution lies in simple generics and most large Indian companies already operate US manufacturing or repackaging units and are exploring further acquisitions,” he said.
The Trump administration has yet to release the findings of its investigation into national security implications of drug imports, which is expected to set the stage for broader tariffs on the industry.
The president last month told CNBC that he would levy tariffs of up to 250% of drug imports, but that they would ramp up over time.
Thursday’s pharmaceutical tariff announcement came the same day as he announced a 50% tariff on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture, as well as a 25% tariff on heavy trucks made outside the US.
