Spain’s food exports to the US fall 10% — US food exports to Spain rise 24%

The Hispano-Luso Report

The tariff season this Report covered in announcements has now been counted in invoices. Spain’s agriculture ministry published its annual foreign-trade report for 2025, and the American page reads like a bill: agri-food and fisheries exports to the United States fell 10% to €3.26 billion, a contraction the ministry attributes principally to the tariff regime imposed by the Trump administration through the year. And the page has a second column the headlines skipped: imports of American farm goods into Spain rose 24% to €2.57 billion. Both currents moved against Spain at once. The bilateral surplus — some €1.4 billion the year before — was roughly halved. A year of tariff politics, converted into a ledger.

The year, dated

The sequence, for the record: a universal 10% US tariff from April 2025; a negotiated EU-US framework in late July fixing a general 15% ceiling from mid-August, with exemptions only for designated strategic products; and, as a consequence, the average American tariff on global agricultural imports rising from under 4% to more than 16% — its highest level since 1930. Spain’s exporters faced the pre-framework uncertainty for half the year and the settled ceiling for the rest, with the ministry noting a distortion that the honest reader must keep: importers stockpiled early in the year ahead of the tariffs, front-loading shipments that flatter the first half and deepen the second. The fall is real; its shape is lumpy.

What held, what fell

The product ledger is where the story lives. Olive oil held the line — €971 million, with the United States confirmed as the second-largest buyer of Spanish oil on earth, behind only Italy: the product too embedded in American kitchens, and too hard to substitute, for a tariff to dislodge in a year. Wine held too — €375 million, the US remaining the fifth market globally and the second outside the EU for Spanish drinks. Vegetable conserves kept third place. The damage concentrated where substitution is easy and margins thin — the commodity end of the Spanish table — while the premium bottles crossed the wall diminished but intact. That pattern is the piece’s first finding: a tariff taxes what can be replaced and merely annoys what cannot.

The other direction

Now the column nobody led with. Spanish purchases of American agri-food products jumped 24%, driven by corn (€773 million) and soybeans (€505 million) — feed grains for the livestock and processing industries that Spain buys wherever price and harvest dictate. This Report states the causation carefully, because the ministry does not claim the tariffs drove it: commodity feed flows follow world prices, crop years and — plausibly — the EU’s commitments in the July framework to buy more American farm goods. What the two numbers show jointly is beyond dispute, though: in the tariff year, the US-Spain food relationship tilted toward America in both directions — Spain selling less and buying more — and the surplus that had been a quiet fixture of the bilateral account shrank by half.

The British hinge

Here is the datum the file prices highest, and the anglo geometry it completes. The United Kingdom remained Spain’s largest food market outside the EU — €5.24 billion, down less than 1% — outselling the American market by more than half again, and barely moving in a year when Washington’s wall cost Spain a tenth of its American trade. The two-way invasion this masthead chronicles in banks, builders and fashion has a grocery lane: Spain’s oil, wine and produce flowing north to British tables at volumes the American market never matched — and, in 2025, at a stability the American market could not offer. In the year the anglosphere’s two great markets diverged, Britain was the steadier customer.

The wall, measured against Brazil

The contrast the season set up, closed by the data. This Report filed, days ago, Brazil’s trade surplus beating forecasts despite the same administration’s tariffs — commodities rerouting to Asia, the wall porous for a superpower of soy and iron. Spain’s ledger shows the wall’s other face: porous for commodity giants, solid for premium exporters — a Brazilian soybean finds another buyer; a Rioja or a Jaén oil has an American customer or none, and pays the toll to reach them. Two countries, the same wall, opposite results — and the difference is not policy but what you sell.

The honest ledger

The counterweights, at full weight. One year is one year — the August start of the 15% ceiling means 2026 is the cleaner test of the settled regime, and the stockpiling distortion runs both ways across the calendar. Exports fell in a strong-euro, weak-harvest context too — olive-oil prices and volumes moved on their own weather, and the ministry’s attribution to tariffs is principal, not sole. The import surge is not a tariff story — stated above and repeated here, because the two numbers invite a causal reading the data does not support. And the ministry talks its book — a report framing exporters’ pain under a foreign administration’s policy is also a domestic argument for support measures.

The scoreboard

Still, mark the bill at its size: the tariff season cost Spain a tenth of its American food trade, halved a bilateral surplus, and left the premium bottles standing while the commodity table thinned — with Britain, quietly, the anglosphere market that did not move. The watch-list takes the 2026 first-half data (the settled-ceiling test), any exemption changes for oil and wine, and the British numbers as the corridor’s stabiliser. The invoice arrived. The next one decides whether it was a bad year or a new price. Watch the half-year.

The Hispano-Luso Report tracks the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking business news that English-speaking coverage overlooks — analysed beyond the English-language headlines. Sources: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food annual foreign-trade report 2025, EU-US trade framework, Bloomberg Línea.