China is Idaho’s seventh-largest export partner. What could tariffs mean?

While the Trump administration continues to paint China as the primary loser in an ongoing trade war, experts and economists are asking a broader question: Could U.S. states that trade with China — like Idaho — be facing significant impacts?

President Donald Trump has put a 145% import tax on China, and in return China has placed a 125% tariff on U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat trade war isn’t the first we’ve seen between the two countries, but the Gem State’s agriculture sector could be caught in the crossfire. China is among Idaho’s top international trading partners.

Overall in 2024, Idaho exported $4.2 billion of goods globally, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. In 2023, the most recent year of available data by country from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Idaho Department of Commerce, China was Idaho’s seventh-largest export partner. Over $180 million in goods, $108 million of which were food and agriculture, went to China. The state’s total food and agriculture exports grew by 4% overall in 2023 to $1.1 billion. That is just under 30% of the state’s exports, and 2023 was the third consecutive year of record exports for the state.

Despite Idaho’s longstanding trade relationship with China, it has been years since the topic of tariffs has been front and center. That’s changing now, though.

“If I can walk into a gas station in the Boise Valley and hear the word tariff, that was not the case three months ago,” said University of Idaho agricultural economics professor Brett Wilder in an interview.

Even so, Wilder argues that many of the conversations around fears over tariffs are missing the bigger picture.

“The reality is that economic jargon and the arguments that are being made rely on the assumption that we live in a perfect world and that nobody cheats and there are no bad actors — and that’s simply not the case,” Wilder said. “The way it’s been done is certainly going to ruffle some feathers.”

Why do tariffs matter?

So what is a tariff? At the most basic level, it is a tax imposed on foreign goods imported into a country that is paid by the importing business to that country’s government. Those taxes increase the overall cost of products, which could get passed on to consumers.

To understand Idaho’s economic exposure, experts note that it helps to look at where the state’s goods are going. Here’s a list complied by the USTR:

• APEC countries(The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation is comprised of 21 countries, including China, Russia, Japan, and Australia): $3.6 billion

• Asia (primarily India): $1.6 billion

• European Union: $305 million

• South/Central America and Caribbean: $215 million

• Sub-Saharan Africa: $14 million

Wilder says Idaho is somewhat shielded from the brunt of the trade war.

“Idaho is going to be more insulated from the tariff trade war with China than other states. If you look at our breakdown, China is actually only about 9% of what we export,” Wilder said.

Still, even a relatively small percentage of billions in exports can carry major economic consequences. Exports supported an estimated 16,000 Idaho jobs in 2022, according to the USTR, and agriculture in Idaho depends heavily on exports.

Top agricultural exports and national ranking in 2022:

• Dairy products: $714 million (3rd-highest)

• Other plant products: $584 million (9th)

• Wheat: $385 million (6th)

• Processed vegetables: $321 million (3rd)

• Beef and veal: $307 million (12th)

The state is home to 25,000 ranches and farms that produce more than 185 commodities, according to the Farm Bureau Service in Idaho.

That means that Idaho farmers — many of whom rely heavily on export markets — could bear the brunt of the trade war. That concern has been echoed by the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“Farm Bureau supports the goals of security and ensuring fair trade, but farmers and rural communities often bear the brunt of tariffs and tariff retaliation. Mexico, Canada and China are the three largest agricultural trading partners. Canada is also the leading supplier of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall noted in a press release in early March.

“We ask the president to continue to look for ways to avoid imposing tariffs that will further drive up the cost of fertilizer and other supplies, and could reduce access to markets for the farm and ranch families dedicated to keeping America’s pantries stocked,” Duvall stated.

Will tariff history repeat itself?

This wouldn’t be the first time Idaho was impacted by tariffs. In 2017, China announced that $26.9 billion of U.S. agricultural exports, or 18% of all U.S. agricultural exports that year, would be subject to tariffs. China, which historically had been the United States’ main export destination for soybeans, levied a 25% tariff on the product.

“Billions of dollars of losses for that industry (soybeans) and there were market facilitation payments given to those farmers to offset that difference. And so in the case for a commodity, especially a large commodity there was an undue harm, the U.S. government came back and filled those holes,” Wilder said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that farmers lost $27 billion in exports during that time. About $28 billion was subsidized by the federal government — more than a third of total farm income during that period, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The administration argues that short-term pain will be offset by long-term economic independence and manufacturing growth.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has hinted at the possibility of similar aid. Earlier this month, she acknowledged frustrations in an interview with C-SPAN but noted, “This will be a short time of uncertainty and then we will move back to the prosperity that this president has envisioned.”

What are long-term impact of tariffs?

Despite past experiences, the long-term effects of the current trade strategy remain uncertain.

“I don’t think we’re going to see the full impact of what exactly the tariff scenario is going to look like for at least three months — now that we’ve added a 90-day extension — but maybe a year or more,” Wilder said. “The point we start worrying about the sky falling is when people can’t pay their bills.”

And for some sectors — particularly farming — the fallout may come sooner than expected.

Farmers are faced with uncertainty as the trade war continues and the planting season quickly approaches. If China continues its tariffs on agricultural products, it could stop importing some of those products altogether as it did with soybeans in the previous trade war. At that time, Chinese buyers began importing from Brazil — which created significant ripple effects.

For Idaho, that meant more crops stayed in-state, but farmers had to accept lower prices on them. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that areas heavily impacted by retaliatory tariffs were mostly agriculture-heavy. Local impacts included slower wage growth and an increase in reliance on government aid.

For family-run farms already operating on thin margins, the impact could mean bankruptcy.

Farm bankruptcy filings nationally were up 55% from 2023, with a total of 216 in 2024. All regions except the Southwest saw an increase in filings, including in the Northwest region (Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming), according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“We already are in a tight economic environment, and one of the fears is: Can the consumer hang on? Can these debt levels be sustained? Can the income levels continue to be achieved? And nobody has the answer,” Wilder said. “The end goal is, can we provide a little breathing room to some of our small local businesses, give them a chance to be profitable for a little while and take it off as a leaping point?”