Formerly a solid American ally, India is faced with the price of 50% of Trump – one of the highest in the world
At the heart of the India Diamond Center, in the western city of Surat, orders were interrupted, the Polishing machines of the GEMMS silence and the fears of more damage and the job losses are high.
This is because Wednesday, the export rates on Indian products heading to the United States are 50%.
“The whole industry is trauma,” said CBC News Kirit Bhansali, chairman of the promotion for promotion for jewelry exports in India and jewelry.
The prices, one of the most punitive President Donald Trump, are leveled in a country with close ties with the United States. The new rate rate includes an additional 25% task on Indian exports to America, which Trump called “a penalty” for India buying Russian oil at reduced prices.
“Even the [initial] 25% were very difficult to digest, “said Bhansali because the gems industry has only small beneficiary margins, oscillating between six and 8%.
“It’s a very sad day for the gems and jewelry sector of India.”
The doubling of the prices by US President Donald Trump on imports from India at 50% is now in force. Trump says that the additional price is designed as a punishment for the purchase of Russian oil.
Bhansali said that some 175,000 diamond and jewelry workers would be directly affected by the new steep rate, as the United States is the sole buyer of India precious stones, representing more than 30% of exports – just under 10 billion US dollars in the last financial year.
Acute undulating pain through the India Gems and Diamonds Industry also strikes shrimp exporters, clothing manufacturers and rod manufacturers in the country of South Asia – all of which have a high number of American buyers.
About half a million shrimp producers are likely to lose their livelihoods following new steep prices, estimates the estimates of India Seafood Exporters Association.
India “Perplexed”
Bhansali said he had not seen any reason for optimism that prices will soon relax.
Trade negotiations between India and the United States are not in the right place, even if the Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs insisted heartless so as not to have completely broken down.
“Negotiations always take place, in the sense that no one said that negotiations were disabled,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Saturday at an event in Delhi. However, an American commercial delegation has canceled a trip to the capital of India planned for this week.
Indian officials have repeated that they will not compromise on the protection of the agricultural sector and the country’s dairy market, a longtime apple of conflict in commercial talks with the United States
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of the need for Indians to focus on “Made in India” and autonomy in the weeks announced that Trump announced the new rate rate.
Manted concern across the country is confusion – that India is even tangled in Trump’s tariff crusade in the first place, and even less in the face of such extreme rate rates, given the geopolitical importance of the South Asian country.
American administrations have become increasingly close to India as an important trading partner in Indo-Pacific and, above all, by countering the assault of China in the region.
The United States and India have signed technology sharing agreements and defense cooperation pacts. Their space agencies collaborate on research and satellite missions.
But now, the two countries are disagreeing on punitive prices that seem to have thrown Indian officials off guard.
“We are not the biggest Russian oil buyers. It is China,” Jaishankar told journalists earlier this month, adding that India was “very perplexed” to logic behind the American move.
A modified relationship
When Trump was re -elected, there was an expectation in certain circles that India could manage the president. It was a feeling of confidentiality but “of irrational exuberance”, said Harsh Pant, vice-president of the foreign policy of the research foundation of observers of reflection groups based in Delhi, borrowing a term popularized by the American economist Robert Shiller.
Many said Pant, said Trump’s friendly relations with Modi would get a sales suspended, despite the fact that the American president had long made his journey against India protectionist trends, qualifying the country as a “tariff king”.
The American president has promised to deploy reciprocal prices on India on April 2, calling on the high prices that India has long been implemented. CBC Salimah Shivji breaks down the prices of India, the industries that are affected and the problems with Trump’s mathematics.
Pant thinks that the current troubled relationship and “the tumultuous atmosphere” will continue in the short term, because Trump wants a commercial victory and India is not in a strong position to give it one.
“The public atmosphere [in India] hardened against Mr. Trump and [his] Administration, “said Pant to CBC News.
This change solidified after Trump tried several times to take credit for ending the end of the conflict between India and Pakistan in May, after the two nuclear weapons exchanged strikes over the disputed region of cashmere. (The two countries claim cashmere in their entirety and have for almost 80 years, but only control it.)
Indian officials have denied Trump’s complaint, who, in turn, thwarted the American president.
“There is so much contradiction in his own approach to India,” said Pant, and that damages the diplomatic relationship, as well as that of trade.
“All the hard work that had been done in recent years” to build stronger links between the two countries “dissipates now,” said Pant.
While the relationship with the United States has embittered, India has transformed its diplomatic efforts to the East, to China, in a renewed effort to restore links that blocked after a deadly confrontation five years ago along the shared border of the countries.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was warmly welcomed in New Delhi earlier this month. Modi will also be in China next week, for his first visit to the country in seven years.
