Hit with 50% tariffs, St. Pierre and Miquelon is the most heavily taxed territory in the world under the Trump administration’s trade measures.

**Translation:**

On the evening of Wednesday April 2, the Trump administration unveiled a list of countries to which it is imposing new, heavy tariffs. The archipelago of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon is the hardest-hit territory, with 50% announced.

“Today we begin to make America rich again,” said Donald Trump at a press conference at the White House on Wednesday April 2. The American president and his administration unveiled a long list of countries to which heavy new tariffs will be applied.

The list includes countries and territories, some of them even uninhabited, which have left many Internet users wondering how the list was compiled.

For example, the list includes the Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, deserted and therefore not involved in any trade whatsoever with the American giant, or with the rest of the world for that matter.

Another territory of interest is the fiscally independent French archipelago of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Along with Lesoto, it is the country to which the Americans impose the heaviest customs duties, i.e. 50% for very few exports to the USA. How is this possible?

It would appear that the Trump administration’s method of calculation is based solely on the 2024 trade balance, which is not at all representative of the reality of trade for the French territory.

The calculation would therefore have been made by taking into account the US trade deficit with each targeted territory before dividing it by the territory’s exports to them. **For the archipelago of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, the year 2024 is the exception, with a single trade in July, when someone somewhere in the United States bought 3.4 million worth of goods.** Mostly seafood.

On the U.S. Census Bureau website, archives of over 30 years of trade with the French North Atlantic archipelago appear. Trade and trade balances have been in equilibrium for at least the last 10 years, when exports of goods to the U.S. have been almost non-existent, or very insignificant.

While the impact on the Saint-Pierre & Miquelon archipelago is minimal or non-existent for the time being, the same cannot be said for other territories, such as the European Union. French President Emmanuel Macron is adamant that Donald Trump’s decision is “brutal and unfounded […] and we are determined not to let it happen”, he adds. For the small territory of Saint Pierre et Miquelon, the question remains: what would be the impact of a trade war that gets bogged down on its inhabitants, who depend solely on imports from Canada and the European Union?

They don’t even trade with the US, that’s why it’s trade deficit balance is so high