Advocates for local produce importers and those backing Florida tomato growers ratcheted up their rhetoric last week in the dispute over the U.S. government’s decision to reopen an investigation into tomato imports from Mexico.

In a news release issued March 12, the Nogales-based Fresh Produce Association of the Americas asserted that Mexican tomatoes support a 33,000-person supply chain in the United States and that all of those jobs are potentially threatened by the Department of Commerce’s recent decision to withdraw from the so-called Tomato Suspension Agreement, a pact signed in 1996 that suspended a U.S. anti-dumping investigation into Mexican tomato producers and established price minimums for tomatoes imported from Mexico.

What’s more, the FPAA said, the government’s decision to withdraw from the deal effective May 7 also stands to increase prices for American consumers by limiting the tomato supply from south of the border.

“Even in the conservative case of a 5-percent reduction in supplies of Mexican tomatoes, consumers would end up paying up to 25 cents more per pound at supermarkets, or up to $790 million more per year for tomatoes,” the FPAA said, citing a recent University of Arizona report.

But in a statement issued the next day, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who has backed his state’s tomato growers in their push to reopen an investigation into whether Mexican competitors are “dumping” their product in the U.S. market at unfairly low prices, offered an America-first rebuttal.

“Washington’s willingness to sacrifice entire domestic industries and local production just to shave pennies off the costs that American consumers might pay for products is one of the main reasons why Donald Trump is president today,” Rubio said. “He rightly understood there is no dignity for American workers in buying cheaper, imported goods without domestic production supporting jobs, paychecks and livelihoods.”

While the two sides sought to portray themselves as defending the interests of regular American workers and consumers, they also took populist swipes at each other, with the FPAA accusing “a small group of wealthy tomato farmers from the politically connected Florida Tomato Exchange” of trying to corner the domestic market.

“The truth appears to be that leaders of the Florida Tomato Exchange (FTE) are on a campaign to portray themselves as the victims to trade while leveraging U.S. trade law to corner the market and drive out competition,” FPAA President Lance Jungmeyer said in the March 12 news release.

Rubio countered that the existing agreement has been unjustly filling the pockets of those who grow and import Mexican tomatoes.

“The faulty economic foundation created by this unfair foreign trade continues to enrich Mexican producers and domestic importers and distributors at the expense of domestic producers. We cannot stand by as some profit from unfair fruit and vegetable imports directly at the expense of their neighbors and countrymen,” he said in the March 13 statement.

The FPAA accused Florida growers of talking out both sides of their mouth by claiming harm from Mexican tomato imports while also driving investments and partnerships in Mexico.

“It is beyond ironic that the growers which grow the largest percentage of Florida tomatoes also own and finance some of the largest growing operations in Mexico,” Jungmeyer said.

The FPAA also asserted that Florida tomatoes had lost footing in the domestic market because of consumer preference. Florida tomatoes are picked green and artificially ripened in rooms that are injected with ethylene gas, it said, and consumers prefer vine-ripened tomatoes grown in other regions like Mexico.

The industry publication The Packer, citing USDA data, reported last week that the United States imported $2.38 billion worth of tomatoes in 2018, up 9 percent from the year before. Most of those tomatoes are from Mexico, which saw the value of its tomato exports to the United States grow by 12 percent during that period.

A University of Arizona report issued in December 2017 noted that tomatoes have traditionally been the leading winter produce item imported through Nogales, accounting for 40 percent of the value of all produce imported through the port. Nogales recently lost its longstanding position as the top U.S. port of entry for Mexican tomatoes, though it still saw close to $600 million worth of the commodity cross its border during the last import season.