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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Tunisian here. Tunisians on social media are baffled/amused because olive oil is basically the only product imported by the US.

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And apparently the US bought 33% of it

>Onagri data show that Spain is the leading destination for Tunisian olive oil, with 47.4 percent flowing to Spanish ports, followed closely by Italy at 42.2 percent and the United States in third at 33.8 percent.

https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/africa-middle-east/as...

This is interesting to me, because Spain and Italy are also exporters of olive oil. And there have been famous discoveries of fraud in the EVOO market as it has boomed. I wonder what percentage of Spanish and Italian EVOO exports are actually blended with (or wholly!) Tunisian imports?

Many Spanish and Italian oil blends do indeed use (unprocessed) olive oil from Tunisia. This is a problem for Tunisia because we’re missing out on the meat of the profit margin generated by the final bottled product.

We have had recent successes with developing & selling our own bottled products directly - Terra Delyssa is one good example that has gained traction in the US market.

Those numbers don't add up.

Tunisia is so productive it exports 123.4% of olive oil.

Or perhaps I don't understand what they're trying to say in that sentence

Oh yeah, that is weird... something not adding up there.

Someone else mentioned a lot of Tunisian olive oil gets repackaged as Italian. I wonder if it could be double counting stuff like that (Italy + final destination). But yeah something is not right there.

What is Tunisia buying from the United States?

http://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports/tunisia

and imports:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/tunisia

Work with your government to drop the tariffs on the US. Problem solved.

Or just wait for Tunisia to gradually replace tariffed goods with EU and Chinese equivalents. Problem also solved?

They could've done that before.

They’ll do that now.

From what I've understood from that chart, the "percentage" is just a difference between imports/exports with the USA. It's not actual tariffs in place by Tunisia ON USA goods. Am I right/wrong ?

Or is Tunisia tariffing the hell out of US Olive Oil in order to protect their local production base

Here is the data from 2016 on tariffs the apply to the US:

https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/TUN/part...

Here is the data from 2022 on tariffs the US applies to Tunisia:

https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/USA/part...

Tunisia applies a shit ton of tariffs on the US imports.

Are you trolling?

No, Tunisia imposes tariffs on U.S. imports. If they want to avoid our tariffs, they can remove theirs, and we'll do the same.

But Trump hasn't calculated these tariffs based on their tariffs. He's calculated it based on trade surplus.

Here is the data from 2016 on tariffs the apply to the US:

https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/TUN/part...

Here is the data from 2022 on tariffs the US applies to Tunisia:

https://wits.worldbank.org/tariff/trains/en/country/USA/part...

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