WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Rick Scott, joined by several colleagues, sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick applauding the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the 2019 Tomato Suspension Agreement, calling it a long-overdue victory for American agriculture. Senator Scott and his colleagues also ask that the administration maintain its planned termination timeline of July 14, 2025, noting that this agreement has harmed American growers and producers for years as it failed to protect them from unfair trade practices and cannot wait any longer for this termination.

Senator Ashley Moody and Congressmen Vern Buchanan, W. Gregory Steube, Byron Donalds, Daniel Webster, Mario Díaz-Balart, Scott Franklin, Carlos Giménez, Gus Bilirakis, H. Morgan Griffith, John Rutherford, Mike Haridopolos, Neal Dunn, Randy Fine, Chuck Edwards, Kat Cammack, Diana Harshbarger, and Tim Burchett cosigned the letter.

In April, Senator Scott applauded this decision by the administration, which followed Senator Scott’s letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and call with the Secretary urging action to protect American businesses and promote fair trade, and thanking him for his dedication to protecting American farmers and their businesses with this critical step.

Read the full letter HERE or below.

Dear Secretary Lutnick:

On behalf of ourselves and our constituents, we would like to thank you for your work and applaud the Trump administration’s April 14, 2025, decision to terminate the suspension agreement on fresh tomatoes from Mexico and replace it with an antidumping duty order as required by the U.S. antidumping law. Antidumping duties are essential to stopping foreign countries and their companies from injuring American farmers, companies, and workers with unfair trade practices as we have seen with Mexican tomatoes.

As the Commerce Department stated clearly in its announcement: “The current agreement has failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced tomatoes.” The termination of the suspension agreement will allow U.S. tomato growers to compete fairly in the marketplace. As you know, under the current (2019) suspension agreement and each of the four prior agreements in 1996, 2002, 2008, and 2013, imports of fresh tomatoes from Mexico decimated American farmers. The domestic industry’s market share fell from about 80 percent in 1994 to about 30 percent today, whereas Mexico’s share of our American fresh tomato market rose from about 20 percent to 70 percent in that same period.

In 2019, the Commerce Department earnestly negotiated major changes to the prior suspension agreements in a good faith effort to ensure that Mexican tomato growers and exporters would stop dumping tomatoes in the United States. The resulting 2019 Agreement, like its predecessors, failed because Mexican tomato growers and exporters were able to continue to sell injurious, unfairly priced Mexican tomato in the United States despite the new agreement.

That is why many of us wrote your predecessor in 2023 to support the termination requested by the domestic tomato industry. The American tomato industry secured the legal right to an antidumping duty order on fresh tomatoes from Mexico in 2019, when, at the domestic industry’s request, Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) continued their final investigations of dumping and injury to completion. The agencies reached affirmative determinations, with Commerce finding Mexican imports were dumped at low prices in the U.S. market and the ITC concluding unanimously that these unfairly traded imports would materially injure the domestic industry absent trade relief. On April 17 of this year, the U.S. Court of International Trade upheld the Commerce Department’s dumping determination.

Upon Commerce’s completion of this termination agreement on July 14, 2025, Mexican producers will experience the consequences of their failure to comply with U.S. law, the imposition of antidumping duties consistent with U.S. law, the WTO Agreement, and United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Mexico agreed to abide by these antidumping duty laws, and the United States needs to strongly enforce them to protect its American tomato producers so they can again compete in a fair U.S. market.

Your recent decision to terminate the agreement was long-awaited and welcomed news, and we ask that you maintain the planned timeline its termination July 14, 2025. American producers and growers have been harmed for years, and we cannot delay termination of this agreement any longer.

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