Brazil exports 12% more to the U.S. despite Trump tariffs against Brazil

“Brazil posted a bigger-than-expected trade surplus in August, helped by a jump in exports to the US despite a full month of President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs,” reports Bloomberg News. The U.S. had a trade surplus with Brazil before imposing big tariffs on it. After the U.S. raised tariffs on Brazilian products, the U.S. actually bought more of them than it did last year:

In August, Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, “exported $33.2 billion” to other countries, “up 12.2% from a year earlier. Imports totaled $25.8 billion, leaving Brazil with a trade surplus of $7.4 billion, bigger than the $7.1 billion median forecast from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Shipments to the US in particular rose 12.1% from a year earlier, an unexpected showing after the new levies fueled concerns that Brazilian exporters would lose ground in their nation’s second-largest trading partner. While there are exceptions on specific goods, the tariffs cover a range of Brazilian products….Shipments to the European Union rose 46.4% in August, but Brazil now faces new export restrictions on animal products after failing to meet the bloc’s requirements governing the use of certain veterinary drugs in livestock. The measures could prove particularly painful for Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef and chicken. European buyers typically pay higher average prices for Brazilian beef than many other markets.”

Last year, the U.S. ran a big trade surplus with Brazil, exporting $54 billion worth of products to Brazil in all of 2025, while importing only $40 billion in Brazilian products. In addition, the U.S. sold $23 billion more worth of services to Brazil in 2025 than Brazil sold to the U.S. So the U.S.. had an overall surplus of $37 billion with Brazil ($14 billion trade surplus in products, plus $23 billion surplus in services).

Brazil’s biggest export product is oil, but China is the largest purchaser of Brazilian oil, not the U.S., which is largely self-sufficient in oil, unlike China. Oil production in Brazil has risen from 3 million barrels per day in 2022 to about 4.5 million barrels per day in 2026.

Raising tariffs can lead to job losses, if they increase the cost of the raw materials our factories use to make their products, or provoke destructive trade wars with other countries. The steel and aluminum tariffs Trump imposed back in 2018 shrank employment by 74,000 jobs, wiping out 75 times more jobs than they saved.

Tariffs on steel wipe out more jobs than they save, because “steel is produced by a tiny sliver of the economy, but used as an input by a much broader swathe of manufacturers,” notes Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan.

Last year, Bloomberg News reported on how many of Trump’s tariffs harmed American manufacturers in the news article “Trump’s Tariffs Aimed at Reviving Manufacturing Are Doing the Opposite.”