Turkey hits US with retaliatory tariffs

Turkey on Thursday hit back at the United States with steep tariffs on $1.8 billion of goods for President Trump’s duties on steel and aluminum imports that went into effect in March.

The tariffs amount to $266.5 million on products from rice to tobacco and autos, paper and coal, according to the World Trade Organization.

{mosads}The additional retaliatory tariffs range between 5 and 40 percent and are set to start on Thursday.

Trump has imposed tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports.

“We cannot and will not allow Turkey to be wrongly blamed for America’s economic challenges,” Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci said in a statement. “We are part of the solution, not the problem.”

Other countries such as India, Canada, Mexico and the European Union, as well as China have either applied retaliatory tariffs on the United States or plan to do so within the next few weeks over Trump’s tariff moves.

Those tariffs are causing great anxiety to ripple through many sectors of the U.S. economy including agriculture, which expects to take one of the biggest hits from the tariffs.