IT’S OFFICIAL: the United States is imposing an additional 12.5-percent tariff on Philippine exports after President Donald Trump approved penalties on trading partners that Washington said failed to adopt adequate safeguards against goods made with forced labor.
The decision was announced Friday (Manila time) by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), which had spent the past several months investigating 60 economies to determine whether they effectively prohibit the importation of goods produced through forced labor.
In its findings, the USTR had said the “Philippines has failed to impose and effectively enforce a forced-labor import prohibition.”
“The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement.
The additional tariff is expected to weigh heavily on the Philippines, whose largest export market is the United States. Philippine exports to the US reached $13.44 billion in 2025, down from $14.5 billion in 2024, but still accounted for 15.9 percent of the country’s total exports.
In a phone interview on Friday, Philippine Exporters Confederation Inc. president Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr. said the new tariffs should push the Philippines to diversify its export markets, as he described Washington’s trade policy as increasingly “unpredictable.”
“Trump is trying to weaponize tariffs against countries,” Ortiz-Luis told the Inqurier. “He is trying to look for other ways to impose (tariffs). He does not even consider that the Philippines is an ally of the United States.” (Logan Kal-El M. Zapanta © Philippine Daily Inquirer)
