China began collecting anti-dumping deposits of up to 54.3 per cent on pecans from Mexico and the United States on 11 August, reaching the world's two largest producers three months before either has a nut to sell.

China's Ministry of Commerce published the preliminary determination a day earlier, finding that pecans from both countries had been dumped and had materially injured Chinese producers. Six Mexican companies that took part in the investigation face deposits of 17.8 to 23 per cent and all other Mexican exporters 51.6 per cent, while every American exporter was assigned a flat 54.3 per cent, according to the ministry's announcement reported by the Global Times. Interested parties have 10 days to file written comments, the South China Morning Post reported.

Pecans are harvested from October in both the United States and northern Mexico, and the trade into China is compressed into the weeks that follow. November and December alone carried 12,600 of the 22,100 tonnes the US shipped to China in 2023, its best year on record, according to US Census Bureau data accessed via Cropli. The deposits land on a marketing year that has not opened, with no shipped volume to grandfather.

[explore products="080299" flow="exports" partner="CN" period="monthly" view="chart" metric="quantity" breakdown="false" years="2022-2026" title="US pecan shipments to China, monthly" subtitle="HS 080299, tonnes - the November and December window carries the year"]

Mexico is the world's second-largest pecan producer after the United States. The Chihuahua state government put the 2025 national crop at 112,900 tonnes, 61 per cent of it grown in Chihuahua, with the rest coming from Coahuila, Durango, Sonora and Nuevo Leon, according to Firco, the federal agricultural trust.

American shipments had all but stopped before the ruling. US exports to China fell from 22,100 tonnes in 2023 to 1,940 tonnes last year and 228 tonnes in the first half of 2026, on the same Census figures, recorded under HS 080299, a customs line for other nuts that on this route is overwhelmingly pecan. The US Department of Agriculture's Beijing post put the applied Chinese tariff on American pecans at 42 per cent in November 2025, against a most-favoured-nation rate of 7 per cent, and flagged a further 25 to 30 points if a Section 301 exclusion process ended on schedule the following month.

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"No US company responded to the investigation, and in accordance with Chinese law and WTO rules, the dumping margin for all US companies was determined on the basis of the best information available," the ministry said, in remarks carried by the Global Times.

The ministry found that dumped imports rose 104.56 per cent by volume over the injury period, from January 2022 to December 2024, gained 9.69 percentage points of market share and undercut prices by 9.15 per cent, according to the South China Morning Post. The USDA's Beijing post described the same years as a change of origin, writing in November that Chinese pecan imports "are likely to increase from South Africa and Mexico who have emerged as the top two suppliers, while the U.S. share is rapidly decreasing".

A self-propelled mechanical shaker clamps the trunk of a pecan tree in an orchard, bringing down nuts and leaves through a cloud of dust

The domestic industry the measure protects produced 6,000 tonnes of in-shell pecans in the 2025/26 marketing year, the Beijing post estimated, against Chinese tree-nut imports of more than 600,000 tonnes in 2024. More than 80,000 hectares are planted across Anhui, Jiangsu and Yunnan, but "many of these plants have either not yet begun bearing or are yielding very low amounts", the report said, and industry sources "suggest that pecans are the most difficult and costly tree nut to cultivate".

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South Africa is China's largest pecan supplier, according to the same report, and is shipping an unusually early share of its own crop. Its exporters had sent 9,224 tonnes of in-shell pecans by the 27th week of the season, 41.4 per cent of what handlers had received, against 24.1 per cent at the same stage in 2022, on figures from the South African Pecan Nut Producers Association reported by FreshPlaza. That pace implies a final crop of about 57,300 tonnes. China said at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Changsha in June 2025 that it would remove tariffs on exports from all 53 African countries with which it has diplomatic relations.

The United States is the obvious destination for Mexican volume shut out of China, and already its largest buyer, but American imports from Mexico ran at 15,600 tonnes in the first half of 2026, worth $131mn, down 29 per cent from a year earlier. US growers are locked out of the Chinese market on the same terms.

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Mexico's economy ministry said it objected to the duties and intended to oppose them through appropriate measures, Reuters reported. The investigation was opened on 25 September 2025, as Mexico was raising tariffs on some 1,400 categories of goods, largely Chinese, under pressure from Washington, according to the South China Morning Post.

The commerce ministry generally has a year from the opening of an investigation to complete it, a deadline that can be extended, the USDA report said. Mexico's harvest starts in October.