(Just The News)—President Donald Trump over the weekend laid down a controversial, across-the-board tariff against China. One aspect of Trump’s ongoing crackdown on trade with China may have bipartisan support: eliminating the de minimis exemption.
Major Chinese companies shipping to the U.S. must pay customs duties and taxes. However, if the shipment is valued at less than $800, they avoid those fees. Through a loophole called the de minimis exemption, they can avoid the taxes and scrutiny of larger shipments.
A Chinese companies like online retailer Temu and Singapore-based Shein, which ship directly to consumers, strategically limit shipments to below the threshold of $800 to avoid paying taxes to the U.S.
When applying this strategy across the companies’ billions of dollars of business across the U.S., the avoided taxes add up.
There are ongoing questions about these Chinese companies’ business practices, including whether they are using slave labor and the exemption to avoid U.S. regulations.
During the Biden administration, that same loophole drew bipartisan criticism. Now, Trump’s executive orders have explicitly stated that its new tariffs apply even to de minimis packages.
The U.S. Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party during the last Congress addressed some of these issues in a report. That bipartisan report from June 2023 said Chinese companies are taking advantage of American tax law.
“These results are shocking: Temu is doing next to nothing to keep its supply chains free from slave labor,” Mike Gallagher, a former Wisconsin lawmaker who formerly chaired the committee, said in the announcement of the report’s release. “At the same time, Temu and Shein are building empires around the de minimis loophole in our import rules – dodging import taxes and evading scrutiny on the millions of goods they sell to Americans.
“We need to take a hard look at this loophole that is being abused to tilt the playing field against American companies,” he added.
The report goes on to say that Temu and Shein alone make up about 30% of all packages using the de minimis exemption.
“Both Temu and Shein rely heavily on the de minimis exception to ship packages directly to U.S. consumers, allowing them to provide less robust data to CBP, avoid import duties, and minimize the likelihood that the packages will be screened for UFLPA compliance,” the report said.
Hundreds of millions of packages each year use this exemption, according to the report, which also raised national security concerns.
From the report:
The overwhelming volume of small packages and lack of actionable data limit CBP’s ability to identify and interdict high-risk shipments that may contain narcotics, merchandise that poses a risk to public safety, counterfeits, or other contraband. For instance, ninety percent of all counterfeit goods were seized by CBP in the de minimis environment. In FY 2022, CBP cleared over 685 million de minimis shipments with insufficient data to properly determine risk. While CBP receives some advance electronic data for Section 321 shipments from carriers, according to the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee, “the transmitted data often does not adequately identify the entity causing the shipment to cross the border, the final recipient, or the contents of the package.”
For these reasons, the de minimis provision is foundational to Shein and Temu’s business models and relevant to the Select Committee’s analysis of each company’s UFLPA compliance regime. The fact that the vast majority of products shipped from both Shein and Temu to American consumers fall under the de minimis exception means that these companies avoid customs duties – making each product cheaper – and are less likely to face the same level of customs scrutiny that other retailers might face on a formal entry.
An antitrust advocate has been calling for the end to the loophole
“Chinese retailers appear to be avoiding tariffs by pricing individual units at absurdly low prices. Don’t get me wrong – low prices are the aim of a healthy, competitive market,” Robert H. Bork Jr., president of the Antitrust Education Project, told The Center Square in September 2024. “But these prices are not the result of economic competition. They are the result of intentional economic warfare. As a result, they are exploiting our economy and effectively doing it tariff-free.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
