The Government of the Canary Islands is analyzing how the tariffs established by the United States affect the exporting companies of the islands, with the intention that their impact is as small as possible for the productive fabric of the islands.
The Vice President of the Government of the Canary Islands and Minister of Economy, Industry, Commerce and Self-Employed, Manuel Domínguez, highlights that the intention of the Executive is to adopt a “surgical” action, company by company.
The trade balance of the Canary Islands with the United States at the moment is in deficit: 202 million euros of imports and 33 million euros of exports.
However, “some companies that trade with the United States do not compute and do not pay tariffs, and others do not appear in the trade balance. For example, the export of cheese to the United States is done through the Peninsula,” says Domínguez.
The vice president was accompanied at the meeting by the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food Sovereignty, Narvay Quintero, among others.
Quintero explained that exports to the United States have improved in recent years and highlighted products such as cheese, which in 2024 reached almost one million euros; wine, whose export has increased by 32%, reaching 140,000 bottles in the last year, or fish, especially sea bass and sea bream, whose export is close to 8.6 million.
The Vice President of the Government of the Canary Islands and Minister of Economy, Industry, Commerce and Self-Employed, Manuel Domínguez, highlights that the intention of the Executive is to adopt a “surgical” action, company by company.
Domínguez met this Thursday with more than twenty Canarian businessmen affected by the tariffs announced by the United States to learn, first-hand, the reality of the sector and assess the potential impact that these measures could have on Canarian export activity.
“We are concerned about the direct effects on exports, but we are even more concerned about the collateral damage from Europe's counter tariffs,” Domínguez says in a statement.
In this sense, he affirms that the proposal of the Ministry of Economy must go far beyond ICO credit lines.
“It is a priority for Canarian companies to be able to assume the increase in costs mitigating measures in the short term, direct and that take into account the circumstances of each one, because a company that exports cheese has nothing to do with one that exports wine or fish,” according to the minister.
Domínguez thanks the companies for their commitment and asks them for “help” to go hand in hand and face this tariff policy in a united way.
These measures, in addition, must be accompanied by structural changes such as the search for new markets that, indicated the minister, “is a priority to seek economic diversification. The Canary Islands has the obligation to be at the forefront of relations with Latin America and West Africa, to seek market alternatives.”
