Bangladesh plans to import more cotton from the United States as a way to fend off possible tariffs.
It’s a strategic move, foreign affairs adviser Md. Touhid Hossain said this week, amid the Trump administration’s proposed efforts to narrow the trade deficit with other countries, a longtime obsession of the president.
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In 2024, the United States imported $8.4 billion worth of goods from the South Asian nation, which, in turn, received $2.2 billion in American exports, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. This created a trade deficit of $6.2 billion, or 2 percent more than the $6 billion from the year before.
President Donald Trump has frequently cited trade surpluses as evidence that America is “being ripped off” by the rest of the world.
Bangladeshi goods are already subject to U.S. tariffs, including a 15.6 percent duty on apparel. The idea, Hossain said, is to prevent additional tariffs that the White House might be eyeing.
“The U.S. government has imposed tariffs on various countries since Donald Trump took office,” he was quoted by the Dhaka-based Business Standard as saying at a joint Economic Reporters Forum and the Bangladesh Cotton Association event. “By importing cotton from the U.S. and exporting garments made from it, we aim to create a situation where they hesitate to impose higher tariffs on us.”
The United States is Bangladesh’s third-largest trading partner after China and India. Similarly, Bangladesh is America’s No. 3 supplier of clothing after China and Vietnam. In a recent letter to interim leader Muhammad Yunus that urged stronger protections for workers following the ouster of disgraced former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, the American Apparel & Footwear Association and the Fair Labor Association said that the “favorable trade partnerships and spirit of collaboration that underpin these markets [have] brought shared prosperity and economic growth.”
But Hossain also said that it was important for Bangladesh to shore up its domestic production of cotton, which despite being a major cash crop, is cultivated in small quantities that meet only 3 percent of the national demand. While he said that the interim government would soon recognize cotton as an agricultural product and introduce subsidies to drive its uptake, potentially within the next three months, he also urged Bangladesh’s National Board of Revenue to eliminate the current 4 percent advance income tax on domestically produced cotton.