By ELÉONORE HUGHES and DIARLEI RODRIGUES

PORCIUNCULA, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian José Natal da Silva often tends to his modest coffee plantation in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state in the middle of the night, sacrificing sleep to fend off pests that could inflict harm on his precious crops.

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But anxiety has troubled his shut-eye even more in recent weeks, following President Donald Trump’s announcement earlier this month of a 50% tariff on Brazilian imported goods, which experts expect to drive down the price of coffee in Brazil.

Da Silva sighed as he recounted his fears, sitting on the dry earth surrounded by his glossy green arabica coffee shrubs, in the small municipality of Porciuncula.

“We’re sad because we struggle so much. We spend years battling to get somewhere. And suddenly, everything starts falling apart, and we’re going to lose everything,” da Silva said. “How are we going to survive?”

Tariff linked to Bolsonaro trial

Trump’s tariff on Brazil is overtly political. In his public letter detailing the reasons for the hike, the U.S. president called the trial of his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, a “ witch hunt.” Bolsonaro is accused of masterminding a coup to overturn his 2022 election loss to left-leaning President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The tariff has sparked ripples of fear in Brazil, particularly among sectors with deep ties to the American market such as beef, orange juice — and coffee. Minor coffee producers say the import tax will hit their margins and adds to the uncertainty already generated by an increasingly dry and unpredictable climate.

Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, exports around 85% of its production. The United States is the country’s top coffee buyer and represents around 16% of exports, according to Brazil’s coffee exporters council Cecafe.

The president of Cecafe’s deliberative council, Márcio Ferreira, told journalists last week that he thinks the U.S. will continue to import Brazilian coffee, even with the hefty tariff. “It’s obvious that neither the United States nor any other source can give up on Brazil, even if it’s tariffed,” he said.

Tariff could hurt competitiveness of Brazilian coffee in U.S.

But the tariff will likely decrease Brazilian coffee’s competitiveness in the U.S. and naturally reduce demand, said Leandro Gilio, a professor of global agribusiness at Insper business school in Sao Paulo.

“There’s no way we can quickly redirect our coffee production to other markets,” Gilio said. “This principally affects small producers, who have less financial power to make investments or support themselves in a period like this.”

Family farmers produce more than two-thirds of Brazilian coffee. They are a majority in Rio state’s northwestern region, where most of the state’s coffee production lies.

Coffee farming is the primary economic activity in these municipalities. In Porciuncula, which neighbors Brazil’s largest coffee-producing state Minas Gerais, gentle mountains are layered with symmetrical lines of coffee shrubs.

Da Silva, who wore a straw hat for protection from the sun and a crucifix around his neck, owns around 40,000 coffee trees. He started working in the fields when he was 12.

Besides coffee, he grows cassava, squash, bananas, oranges and lemons and has a few chickens that provide fresh eggs. “We have them because of the fear of not being able to eat. We wouldn’t manage if everything were bought, because the profit is very low,” he said.

Last year, drought — made more likely by human-caused climate change — devastated large swathes of da Silva’s production. The reduction in supply pushed coffee prices up, but only after many small-scale farmers had already sold all their crops.

Since peaking in February, prices of arabica have fallen, dropping 33% by July, according to the University of Sao Paulo’s Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics, which provides renowned commodity price reports.

“When you make an investment, counting on a certain price for coffee, and then when you go to sell it the price is 20-30% less than you calculated, it breaks the producers,” said Paulo Vitor Menezes Freitas, 31, who also owns a modest plantation of around 35,000 coffee trees in the nearby municipality of Varre-Sai.

The demands of coffee farming

Life out in the fields is tough, according to Menezes Freitas.

During harvest season, he sometimes gets up at 3 a.m. to turn on a coffee drier, going to bed as late as midnight. The rest of the year is less intense, but still, there are few to no breaks because there’s always work to do, he said.

Menezes Freitas, who is expecting his first child in October, said the tariff’s announcement increased his fears for the future.

“It’s scary. It feels like you’re on shaky ground. If things get worse, what will we do? People will start pulling out their coffee and finding other ways to survive because they won’t have the means to continue,” he said.

In addition to slashing the value of his coffee beans, Menezes Freitas said the tariff will impact machinery and aluminum — goods that producers like him use every day.

“We hope this calms down. Hopefully, they’ll come to their senses and remove that tariff. I think it would be better for both the United States and Brazil,” he said.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The revelation that Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Donald Trump that his name was in the Jeffrey Epstein files has focused fresh attention on the president’s relationship with the wealthy financier and the Justice Department’s announcement this month that it would not be releasing any additional documents from the case.

But at least some of the information in the briefing to Trump, which The Wall Street Journal said took place in May, should not have been a surprise.

The president’s association with Epstein is well-established and his name was included in records that his own Justice Department released back in February as part of an effort to satisfy public interest in information from the sex-trafficking investigation.

Trump has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and the mere inclusion of someone’s name in files from the investigation does not imply otherwise. Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, also had many prominent friends in political and celebrity circles besides Trump.

Trump’s ties to Epstein

It should have been no shock to Trump that his name would be found in records related to Epstein.

The February document dump from the Justice Department included references to Trump in Epstein’s phone book and his name was also mentioned in flight logs for Epstein’s private plane.

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Over the years, thousands of pages of records have been released through lawsuits, Epstein’s criminal dockets, public disclosures and Freedom of Information Act requests. In January 2024, a court unsealed the final batch of a trove of documents that had been collected as evidence in a lawsuit filed by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre.

Records made public also include 2016 deposition in which an accuser recounted spending several hours with Epstein at Trump’s Atlantic City casino but didn’t say if she actually met Trump and did not accuse him of any wrongdoing. Trump has also said that he once thought Epstein was a “terrific guy,” but that they later had a falling out.

“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump said in 2019 when video footage unearthed by NBC News following Epstein’s federal indictment showed the two chatting at a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 1992, when the now president was newly divorced. ”He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling-out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years.”

The department’s decision to not release additional files from the case

The Justice Department stunned conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and elements of Trump’s base this month when it released a two-page letter saying that a so-called Epstein “client list” that Bondi had once intimated was on her desk did not exist and that officials did not plan to release any additional documents from its investigation despite an earlier commitment to provide transparency.

Whether Bondi’s briefing to Trump in May influenced that decision is unclear.

The Justice Department did not comment directly on her meeting with Trump but Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a joint statement that a review of the Epstein files showed that there was nothing warranting further investigation or prosecution.

“As part of our routine briefing,” the statement said, “we made the President aware of our findings.”

By MIKE STOBBE, Associated Press Medical Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with less than 1.6 kids per woman, new federal data released Thursday shows.

The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all.

The new statistic is on par with fertility rates in western European countries, according to World Bank data.

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Alarmed by recent drops, the Trump administration has taken steps to increase falling birth rates, like issuing an executive order meant to expand access to and reduce costs of in vitro fertilization and backing the idea of “baby bonuses” that might encourage more couples to have kids.

But there’s no reason to be alarmed, according to Leslie Root, a University of Colorado Boulder researcher focused on fertility and population policy.

“We’re seeing this as part of an ongoing process of fertility delay. We know that the U.S. population is still growing, and we still have a natural increase — more births than deaths,” she said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the statistic for the total fertility rate with updated birth data for 2024.

In the early 1960s, the U.S. total fertility rate was around 3.5, but plummeted to 1.7 by 1976 after the Baby Boom ended. It gradually rose to 2.1 in 2007 before falling again, aside from a 2014 uptick. The rate in 2023 was 1.621, and inched down in 2024 to 1.599, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Birth rates are generally declining for women in most age groups — and that doesn’t seem likely to change in the near future, said Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.

People are marrying later and also worried about their ability to have the money, health insurance and other resources needed to raise children in a stable environment.

“Worry is not a good moment to have kids,” and that’s why birth rates in most age groups are not improving, she said.

Asked about birth-promoting measures outlined by the Trump administration, Guzzo said they don’t tackle larger needs like parental leave and affordable child care.

“The things that they are doing are really symbolic and not likely to budge things for real Americans,” she said.

Increase in births in new data

The CDC’s new report, which is based on a more complete review of birth certificates than provisional data released earlier this year, also showed a 1% increase in births — about 33,000 more — last year compared to the prior year.

That brought the yearly national total to just over 3.6 million babies born.

But this is different: The provisional data indicated birth rate increases last year for women in their late 20s and 30s. However, the new report found birth rate declines for women in their 20s and early 30s, and no change for women in their late 30s.

What happened? CDC officials said it was due to recalculations stemming from a change in the U.S. Census population estimates used to compute the birth rate.

That’s plausible, Root said. As the total population of women of childbearing age grew due to immigration, it offset small increases in births to women in those age groups, she said.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.