A new tiered tariff scheme rolled out by the Donald Trump administration has raised alarms among top Dominican business leaders, who say the policy could erode the competitiveness of Dominican goods shipped to the United States, force price hikes, and require urgent renegotiation of existing sales contracts with American buyers.
The new tariff schedule applies levies between 10% and 12.5% on imports from 60 nations worldwide, with the Dominican Republic included in the group facing the higher 12.5% rate. The warnings come jointly from Roselyn Amaro Bergés, executive vice president of the Dominican Association of Exporters (Adoexpo), and Celso Juan Marranzini, president of the National Council of Private Companies (Conep), who confirmed the new framework replaces the temporary 10% global import surcharge the U.S. first implemented back in February. That temporary measure expired at the end of last week, making way for the new differentiated rate structure.
Unlike the flat temporary surcharge, the updated policy assigns different rates to different countries. For Dominican exports that fall under the tariff, the 2.5 percentage point increase from the old 10% rate may seem modest on paper, but business leaders say it will deliver an outsize impact on trade. This is particularly true for goods with already thin profit margins, products locked into long-term fixed-price contracts, and items that compete directly with exports from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – all of which are assigned the lower 10% tariff under the new scheme.
Amaro explained that trade teams are still conducting a line-by-line review of tariff annexes and subheadings to map the full scope of the policy’s impact on Dominican exports. So far, analysts have confirmed that U.S. officials carved out exclusions for a small set of goods, including select textiles, food products, and fertilizers. But a large share of Dominican trade remains subject to the higher rate.
Preliminary assessments identify the most at-risk sectors as non-excluded agricultural and agro-industrial goods, plastic manufactured products, iron and steel items, metal structures and components, and a range of other domestic manufactured goods that currently enter the U.S. duty-free or at preferential rates under the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA).
Adoexpo stressed that the impact will not be evenly distributed across the country’s export sector. The severity of harm will depend on multiple factors: the specific product in question, the baseline tariff a product already faced, its current share of the U.S. market, and an individual firm’s ability to either absorb the extra cost or pass it on to American buyers without losing sales.
The organization also acknowledged that there is a tangible risk of American importers shifting purchase orders to suppliers in countries that qualify for lower tariffs or full exemptions from the new scheme. In price-sensitive sectors, even that 2.5 percentage point gap can swing purchasing decisions, Amaro noted. U.S. buyers may respond by demanding that Dominican exporters cut prices, ask to split the cost of the new tariff, or walk away from planned future orders entirely.
Despite these headwinds, Amaro pointed out that the Dominican Republic retains key competitive advantages that could soften the blow: its close geographic proximity to the U.S. translates to shorter delivery times, Dominican exporters have a long track record of reliability, the country’s supply chains remain stable, and it has a established, rules-based trade framework in place through DR-CAFTA.
For his part, Conep’s Marranzini warned that medium- and long-term retention of the higher tariff could cause deeper damage, especially as neighboring Mexico maintains more favorable access to the U.S. market. The policy could also slow the Dominican Republic’s growing momentum in attracting nearshoring investment as companies shift supply chains out of Asia to be closer to North American consumers. Marranzini argued that proactive dialogue between Dominican and U.S. trade authorities is critical to securing the lowest possible tariff tier for Dominican exports, and that targeted government support is needed immediately to help vulnerable local companies weather the new costs.