A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The trade wars the U.S. is waging with countries around the world could reshape the global economy. That economy is made up of individual farmers, business owners, manufacturers, millions of people who are going to have to reevaluate relationships they may have been building for years. Planet Money's Amanda Aronczyk has this dispatch from Canada.
AMANDA ARONCZYK, BYLINE: So I guess, would you mind introducing yourself?
ALIX RODRIGUES: My name is Alix, Alix Rodrigues. And I have a small business here in Vancouver, Canada, called Nut Hut.
ARONCZYK: Yeah, it's called Nut Hut. I feel like it's good for your brand - right? - to be fun.
RODRIGUES: To be fun, yeah, but I quickly learned not to use that hashtag because it takes people to not very good places.
ARONCZYK: Anyhow, Alix has been running her small business in Vancouver for almost a decade. It's a specialty shop. She sells just nuts, seeds, chocolate and dried fruit. And buying these items from small, sustainably run farms is one of the main things she focuses on. And back in 2020, she made this kind of amazing find - a pecan supplier in Arkansas named Shirley Rollow, who ships pecans from this very special farm.
SHIRLEY ROLLOW: The ground is just fertile, and it's just a perfect place for pecans to grow.
ARONCZYK: Shirley says the pecans grow by the river on these giant trees. The nuts are essentially wild.
ROLLOW: That's why they taste so good because they're native pecans, and they have a much better taste and flavor.
ARONCZYK: ...Than your usual grocery store pecan. Shirley and Alix have been importing and exporting across the U.S.-Canada border ever since.
RODRIGUES: I know with Shirley, every single time we've bought from her, the quality is exceptional. And she has the paperwork done within, like, hours. So, like, just finding the people that you can count on.
ARONCZYK: ...Which they have. And they've built up trust, a really valuable thing in business. Not long after President Trump's announcement of tariffs on many imports from Canada, Canada retaliated, made a targeted list of items, including a 25% tariff on pecans. Alix and Shirley found themselves in the middle of a trade war. So Alix decides she needs to get the pecans over the border as soon as possible before the tariffs can kick in. She calls up Shirley, and she says, can you get those pecans on the road?
RODRIGUES: I just hopped into speed mode with Shirley.
ARONCZYK: Shirley hurries to get Alix's order ready. Who knows? Maybe this will be their last order. It might become too expensive to import pecans into Canada. Before all of these tariffs, Shirley, the pecan supplier, had even been thinking about trying to expand into grocery stores in Canada. But with all of the chaos around Trump's tariffs, Shirley says that doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore.
ROLLOW: I mean, this guy changes every other day. One day he's going to do it, and the next day he's not. Well, a normal person doesn't do business that way. You know what I'm saying? You make your decision, and you stick with it.
ARONCZYK: The pecans did arrive in Canada on time, the day before the retaliatory tariffs kicked in. So Alix of the Nut Hut had successfully stockpiled a year's supply of pecans just in time. But now she is not sure if her Canadian customers will buy American products. Will there be more retaliatory tariffs? And how big a toll will all of this take on her small business?
RODRIGUES: At this point, I don't know. Who knows? We don't know.
ARONCZYK: Amanda Aronczyk, NPR News.
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