Let’s start at the end, because it’s the most absurd part. A person in the United States can’t buy a new Hilux — the legendary pickup that, in half the world’s countries, is the benchmark for off-road capability, and in the other half, a status symbol meaning “I’ve got everything under control.” Formally, the obstacle is the “25-year rule”: cars not certified to American safety standards may only be imported once they are a quarter-century old. But that rule binds only private importers — and for a long time now, it has merely covered up another ban. Toyota, an auto-industry giant, could theoretically certify the Hilux for the United States whenever it wanted — and has declined to do so for sixty straight years. The real reason lies elsewhere: a 25-percent duty on imported light trucks, sitting in the American customs tariff since 1964 and known as the “chicken tax.” There hasn’t been a chicken in it for a very long time.
This is the story of how a trade spat over frozen poultry spawned a tariff that outlived its cause, its product, and nearly everyone involved. And, along the way, why American pickups are so huge, so expensive, and so... local.
It’s hard to believe today, but as late as the early sixties, chicken in Europe was a holiday dish — pricier than beef and far rarer on the table. Then the American broiler sailed across the Atlantic. Postwar U.S. poultry farming had turned into an assembly line: cages, antibiotics, genetics, rapid weight gain. Costs fell so fast that, by the early sixties, America was overflowing with chicken — and looking to exports as a release valve.
Europe couldn’t hold out. According to Time in 1962, chicken consumption in West Germany rose 23 percent in 1961 alone, while Americans, with $45 million worth of shipments, captured nearly half of Europe’s poultry imports. Local producers, who had spent their lives selling chicken at the price of a Christmas goose, saw it as an invasion of cheap meat from across the ocean.
The reaction was proportionately hysterical. The Dutch accused the United States of dumping — selling poultry below cost. Bavarian farm associations demanded a ban because, they said, American chickens were “fattened on arsenic.” The French government went further than anyone and officially barred American poultry imports — citing hormones that “could have a catastrophic effect on male virility.” History has not preserved the number of Frenchmen who decided to test that hypothesis on themselves.
The blow from across the ocean landed on a small American state with big ambitions. By the early sixties, Arkansas was the capital of America’s broiler industry: Benton County alone produced more chickens than some European countries. The export drive was led by Bill Simmons of Plus Poultry in the town of Siloam Springs — a man who wrote to a senator in 1960 that “poultry from Northwest Arkansas moves into export channels almost weekly.” By late 1962, his company was shipping Europe some fifty semi-trailers of frozen chicken a week.
Then the EEC erected a barrier: a unified chicken-import duty — 13 cents per pound, introduced under the Common Agricultural Policy. The effect was immediate: Plus Poultry’s exports in 1963 fell threefold. American poultry farmers lost a quarter of their export sales in a year; the industry’s total losses were estimated at $26–28 million — roughly a third of a billion today, adjusted for inflation.
Senator James William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put on a show in Geneva that made it into Time: right in the middle of debates on NATO nuclear arms, he interrupted his colleagues with a question about continental hostility toward American chickens. Time dubbed the senator “chicken-fat Arkansas.” Fulbright wrote to the owner of Tyson Foods — yes, that Tyson Foods — that the government was doing everything it could, “short of sending a battleship up the Rhine,” and threatened to reduce the American contingent in West Germany.
The best part surfaced later. In his old age, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer recalled that he had corresponded with Kennedy for two years: about Berlin, Laos, the Bay of Pigs — “and, I suppose, about half of this correspondence was about chickens.”
Negotiations dragged for eighteen months. On December 4, 1963 — twelve days after Kennedy’s assassination — the new president, Lyndon Johnson, signed Proclamation 3564. The document opens with a paragraph worth reading aloud: “Whereas the European Economic Community maintains unjustifiable restrictions on imports of poultry from the United States…” — and then imposes retaliatory 25-percent duties on four categories of European imports:
The first three items were rhetorical cover — a slap on the wrist for France and Germany, the architects of the chicken ban. The fourth was the real business. Commentators later calculated that this rate was nearly ten times the average American tariff. The duties took effect on January 7, 1964. By comparison, ordinary passenger cars entered the United States under a 2.5-percent duty.
Legally, everything was clean: Johnson acted under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and GATT rules allowing a party to offset losses from discriminatory tariffs. Politically — not clean at all. But more on that in a moment.
The official version — “we were just punishing Europeans over chicken” — survived for decades, until historians listened to the Oval Office tape recordings. In January 1964, Johnson was negotiating with Walter Reuther, head of the UAW union representing the auto industry. The president needed two things: a strike-free autumn before the 1964 election and the union’s support for his civil-rights program. In return, Reuther asked for something modest: stop the Volkswagen onslaught, as it ramped up shipments of Type 2 light trucks — those very “hippie” vans and rear-engined pickups.
The deal was struck. Trucks landed in the final proclamation not because France had banned chicken, but because Detroit asked for them. A 25-percent duty on vehicles worth $1000 or more was not protection from the expansion America itself condemned, but a monetized political debt. Chicken was the pretext; VW the target; Reuther the beneficiary.
That precision strike worked instantly. Imports of “automotive trucks” from West Germany collapsed to $5.7 million in 1964 — roughly a third of the previous year’s figure — while VW vans and pickups “virtually disappeared from the American market.” The Japanese got swept up alongside Volkswagen’s vans: Toyota, with pickups based on the Publica and Crown, the Datsun Sunny Truck, the Isuzu Wasp, the Mazda Familia — all took their models back home and stayed out for several decades.
The funniest part: Europe lifted its chicken restrictions as early as 1964 — something Time had already reported under the headline “Chicken War Over” in November 1963 — before America even signed its retaliation. Three of the proclamation’s four items died off — starch, dextrin, cognac. Only the fourth remained.
Then began a sixty-year theater in which other automakers performed obedience while actually inventing ever-new ways to get a truck through customs.
The first round was the “chassis cab.” The Japanese shipped pickups without cargo beds: formally, not a truck but an unfinished chassis subject to a 4-percent duty. The bed was bolted on after landing — Toyota built a network of fifteen subcontractors stamping, welding, and painting the bedsides, severely limiting the paint palette to cut costs. This customs accounting was where Toyota’s North American truck empire began. Customs shut the scheme down only in 1980.
The second round was the Subaru BRAT, 1978–1987. To make the pickup count as a “passenger automobile” subject to a 2.5% duty, Subaru installed two rear-facing passenger seats in the metal cargo bed — with seat belts and carpeting. They were welded permanently in place so no one could remove them: the customs officer had to see a “family car.” Passengers riding backward, facing the wind, remembered the experience fondly only from their hospital beds. But legally — flawless.
The third round was the “kit.” Between 2001 and 2006, Mercedes shipped Sprinter vans from Düsseldorf to South Carolina as a set of parts and assembled them in a “small finishing building”: a complete cargo van would pay 25 percent, while a parts kit paid practically nothing.
The final round was played by Ford itself — and it lost badly. From 2009 onward, Turkish-built Transit Connects sailed into Baltimore in “passenger” trim: rear seats, belts, windows — all in place. Right in the Baltimore facility of logistics operator Wallenius Wilhelmsen, the seats and windows were removed, the openings covered with metal panels, and the removed parts shredded in Ohio. They were not returned to the manufacturer or sold — they were ground up for recycling so nobody could get suspicious. Every such conversion cost Ford hundreds of dollars per vehicle and saved thousands in duties. According to Customs and Border Protection estimates, between 2002 and 2018 the scheme saved Ford around $250 million. Then came court: in 2013, Customs demanded that the imported vehicles be classified as trucks; Ford won in the Court of International Trade in 2017, lost on appeal in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2020, and in 2024 the company settled the dispute with the Department of Justice — paying $365 million in duties and penalties. The savings cost more than the duty.
What does a tariff do over sixty years? First, it makes pickups expensive. By the preliminary estimate of Cox Automotive economist Jonathan Smoke, while passenger-car prices in the United States rose by roughly 2 percent a year, pickup prices rose by 5–6 percent. An unnamed markup stretched across generations: buyers simply assumed that “a real truck costs that much.”
Second, it artificially nurtured the equation “pickup = profit machine.” Shielded from Japanese pickups, Detroit milked full-size trucks for profit and felt no urgency to build economical models; Harvard professor Robert Lawrence argues that forty years of isolation from competition in light trucks simply “undermined” the American auto industry. By 2003, when the Cato Institute called the tariff “a policy in search of a rationale,” domestic producers already controlled 87 percent of the pickup market — meaning there was nothing left to argue about: the tariff protected the winners.
Third, it shifted production. Japanese brands built plants in the United States and Canada — but, as the same Ikenson acknowledges, not so much because of the 25 percent as because of basic logistics: importing vehicles was cheap anyway, while producing close to the customer paid for itself. After NAFTA in 1994, the need for exotic workarounds disappeared: assemble a pickup in Mexico or Canada and import it duty-free. That is how today’s geography took shape: the Toyota Tacoma is stamped out in Texas and Baja California, the Nissan Frontier in Mississippi, while the “European” Hilux remained an overseas legend.
The side effect was size. Isolated from compact Japanese pickups, American manufacturers spent decades slicing up the market with heavyweights, and when compact pickups finally returned, they came back as “midsize.” The American pickup is not an evolution of taste but the costly shadow of a tariff wall: legal commentators — including the Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy — link American gigantism and emissions directly to this cushion of protection.
You might think that, amid a new era of tariff wars, the old duty would finally be rewritten. But in April 2025, CNN reminded readers: the chicken tax is alive and well — an object lesson for anyone who believes new tariffs are a temporary epidemic. Economist Dan Ikenson, who wrote a Cato Institute study in 2003 calling for the rate’s repeal, put the diagnosis this way: “Interest groups immediately coalesce around tariffs and begin living lives of their own — that’s why tariffs are such long-lived creatures.”
According to customs brokers in autumn 2026, the rate remains 25 percent under code 8704, and against the backdrop of new sectoral tariffs, the final figures for imported pickups from certain countries have soared outright: a truck from Britain, for instance, enters the United States under a combined burden of 35 percent if it is over 25 years old, and a full 50 if it is newer. The only imported pickup on the American market paying the chicken tax in full is the Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster: its buyers are rare enthusiasts, voluntarily paying an extra quarter of the price for the right to drive an anachronism.
And the Hilux? TikTok insists its arrival would “bankrupt Ford and Chevrolet” — one video collected one and a half million views. Motor1, however, is skeptical: the Tacoma has been America’s best-selling midsize pickup for twenty-one consecutive years, and 2025 was a record year for it; Toyota simply has no need for a war over one more market. The chicken tax has long ceased to be necessary for anyone except those who profit from it — and that is the longest-lived kind of reason there is.
The chicken died long ago — even symbolically: in 1964, when Europe lifted its restrictions. But the pickup tariff remained, because every meaningless thing has its support: a union that found protection; a corporation that found margin; a customs officer who found a job; a buyer who found an explanation for why “a real pickup is bigger than a passenger car.” Institutions outlive the reasons for their creation — it’s neither a bug nor a feature, just the thermodynamics of bureaucracy. So next time you see an American pickup the size of a student’s apartment on the road, know this: pressed inside that beast is a frozen Arkansas chicken, 1962 vintage — uneaten, paid for, and still listed in the customs tariff.