Brasilia’s foreign trade chamber has rolled out a fresh package of import duty relief covering nearly 500 capital goods, dozens of IT and telecom products, and a reworked exemption list for trucks, trailers, and farm machinery, extending a year of rapid-fire tariff engineering aimed at cutting the cost of industrial modernization.
BRASILIA, September 4, 2026 Brazil’s Executive Management Committee of the Foreign Trade Chamber, known as Gecex/Camex, announced a package of import tariff measures on Thursday that modifies duties on 491 capital goods, temporarily eliminates import duties on 34 information technology and telecommunications products, and reshapes the ex-tarifario exemption list covering trucks, trailers, semi-trailers, and agricultural and road machinery. The measures, logged by the Global Trade Alert monitoring initiative under intervention identifiers 159616, 159613, 159590, and 159589, were all announced on September 4, 2026, and are not yet in force. Taken together, they represent one of the broadest single-day adjustments to Brazil’s capital goods tariff schedule this year, and they arrive at a moment when Brazilian industry is simultaneously absorbing a 50 percent United States tariff wall on its exports and pressing the government for cheaper access to imported machinery that has no domestic equivalent.
What the September package contains
The measures announced on September 4 correspond to a cluster of Gecex resolutions published in Brazil’s Official Gazette, the Diario Oficial da Uniao, on the same day. According to a circular issued by SINDASP, the Sao Paulo customs brokers’ union, which tracks Official Gazette publications for the trade community, the batch included Resolution Gecex 952 of September 3, which alters the validity periods and descriptions of provisionally granted capital goods ex-tarifarios under Resolution 780 of August 2025; Resolution Gecex 953 of September 3, which grants and alters ex-tarifarios for capital goods under the same framework resolution; Resolution Gecex 954 of September 2, which grants and alters ex-tarifarios for information technology and telecommunications goods under Resolution 781 of August 2025; Resolution Gecex 955 of September 2, which amends Resolution 311 of February 2022 to grant ex-tarifarios for automotive products classified in the Mercosur Common Nomenclature as capital goods; and Resolution Gecex 956 of September 3, which adds products to Brazil’s List of Exceptions to the Common External Tariff under Resolution 272 of November 2021.
The automotive strand of the package, implemented through Resolution 955, is the vehicle for the changes to the exemption list covering trucks, trailers, semi-trailers, and agricultural and road machinery that Global Trade Alert recorded. Resolution 311 of 2022 is the standing legal basis for ex-tarifario treatment of automotive products that qualify as capital goods, a category that includes heavy commercial vehicles and self-propelled farm equipment. According to a summary published by the Brazilian legal information service LegisWeb, the new automotive entries include machines such as robotic reapers classified under Mercosur nomenclature code 8433.20.90 and self-propelled olive harvesting machines under code 8433.59.90, with the new concessions valid through August 31, 2028.
The same round of Official Gazette publications carried a set of trade defense decisions that underline how busy the committee’s docket has become. Gecex applied a definitive antidumping duty on imports of PET resin from Malaysia and Vietnam, extended an existing antidumping duty on seamless carbon steel line pipe from Ukraine, imposed a provisional antidumping duty on glass fiber from China and Egypt, and ruled on a reconsideration request concerning duties on colorless flat float glass from Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey, according to the SINDASP circular. Those defensive measures move in the opposite direction from the duty relief on machinery, and the juxtaposition captures the balancing act that Brazilian trade policy is attempting: cheaper inputs and equipment for producers, tighter screens against import competition in finished and intermediate industrial materials.
Because the Global Trade Alert entries record the measures as announced but not yet in force, importers should treat the effective dates in the underlying resolutions as controlling. Gecex tariff resolutions typically take effect on publication or on a date specified in the text, and the provisional ex-tarifario framework created in 2025 and 2026 has produced concessions with staggered expiry dates, some running only months and others reaching into 2028.
How the ex-tarifario machine works
The ex-tarifario regime is the workhorse of Brazilian capital goods trade policy. Under the mechanism, the government temporarily reduces, usually to zero, the Mercosur Common External Tariff on specific capital goods, IT, and telecommunications products for which no equivalent domestic production exists. The Common External Tariff, or TEC in its Portuguese acronym, ordinarily applies rates in the low to mid teens on machinery categories, so a successful ex-tarifario petition can remove a double-digit cost layer from an equipment import. The exemptions are product-specific to an unusual degree: each “ex” is a carve-out written beneath an eight-digit Mercosur nomenclature code, describing a particular machine configuration in technical detail, so that the zero rate applies only to goods matching that description.
The United States International Trade Administration, in a market intelligence note on the program, has described how the application process was tightened in recent years. Applicants must now submit an investment project explaining how the imported good will be used and what gains it is expected to deliver, and Brazilian domestic manufacturers were given more tools to contest exemption requests by asserting that equivalent national production exists. The ITA noted that more than 20,000 tariff exceptions have been granted over the life of the program, a figure that conveys both the scale of the mechanism and the administrative churn it generates: concessions expire, are renewed, are revoked when domestic production emerges, and are amended when technical descriptions need correcting.
That churn explains why the September 4 package touches 491 capital goods lines in a single stroke. A large share of Gecex’s routine output consists of granting new exemptions, extending existing ones, and adjusting descriptions, and the committee has consolidated its capital goods and IT lists under framework Resolutions 780 and 781 of August 2025, which the new resolutions amend. A separate resolution published a day earlier, Resolution 951 of September 3, addressed the extension of existing ex-tarifarios for periods of up to two years, according to LegisWeb, signaling that the committee is also working through a backlog of renewal requests as concessions granted in earlier cycles approach expiry.
A whipsaw year for Brazilian tariff policy
The September package lands at the end of an unusually volatile stretch of tariff management. In early February 2026, Gecex issued Resolution 852, which raised import duty rates on a long list of capital goods and IT and telecommunications products. The increase covered more than 1,200 products, with machine tools, industrial automation equipment, electronics, and semiconductors among the most affected categories, according to reporting by the Rio Times on the machinery sector. The move, driven partly by fiscal considerations and partly by pressure from domestic equipment makers, provoked immediate pushback from importers and from technology companies facing higher costs on smartphones, notebooks, and components.
The reversal came quickly. On February 27, 2026, Gecex published Resolution 866 in an extra edition of the Official Gazette. According to an analysis by the Brazilian law firm Mattos Filho, the resolution reduced to zero the import duty on 105 products classified as capital goods and IT and telecommunications goods, acting on ex-tarifario petitions filed under an exceptional fast-track window created by Resolution 853 of 2026, which allowed temporary 120-day duty reductions to be requested between February 9 and March 31 for products whose Common External Tariff treatment had changed. Resolution 866 also rolled back the increases that Resolution 852 had imposed on 15 technology products, returning smartphones and notebooks to a 16 percent rate rather than the planned 20 percent, restoring motherboards and routers to their prior levels, and returning unmounted and surface-mount CPUs to zero, according to the Mattos Filho summary. The regulatory tracking service Regfollower reported that the February relief package covered goods ranging from air conditioner compressors and cotton harvesters to fiber laser welding machines and AI-assisted ultrasound equipment, and framed the decision as an attempt to balance support for domestic industry against consumer price pressures.
The rhythm continued through the middle of the year. Resolution 939 of July 17, 2026 zeroed duties on 11 products subject to import quotas. Resolution 943 of August 6, 2026 moved in the other direction, raising some tariff rates. Earlier in the year the committee added 614 capital goods to the ex-tarifario list while removing a smaller number, with the resulting concessions carrying staggered validity dates, some expiring as early as September 9, 2026 and others running to April 2028. Resolution 942 of July 31 adjusted the validity periods and descriptions of provisionally granted exemptions across both the capital goods and IT lists, according to LegisWeb.
For customs planners, the pattern is clear even where individual line items are hard to track: Brazil is running its capital goods tariff schedule as an actively managed portfolio, adjusting rates and exemptions on a nearly monthly cadence. The September 4 package, with its 491 capital goods modifications and 34 IT and telecom eliminations, is the largest single adjustment since the February episode and confirms that the committee’s default posture for equipment without domestic equivalents remains liberal, even as headline rates on goods with local production have firmed.
Industry reaction: relief welcomed, direction contested
Brazil’s machinery producers and its machinery buyers sit on opposite sides of every one of these decisions, and both camps have been vocal through 2026. Abimaq, the Brazilian machinery and equipment industry association, has generally supported tariff protection for equipment categories with domestic production while accepting the ex-tarifario principle for goods without national equivalents. The association’s larger preoccupation this year has been external: its president has projected a decline of 10 to 11 percent in Brazilian machinery and equipment exports to the United States as a result of the American tariff measures, according to reporting carried by the Rio Times. The same reporting noted that the sector’s domestic recovery is being squeezed between rising import penetration and high interest rates, which raise the financing cost of any capital investment, imported or domestic.
The National Confederation of Industry, CNI, has pushed the government to respond to the external shock with industrial policy rather than retaliation. In July, the confederation proposed expanding Nova Industria Brasil, the government’s flagship industrial strategy, with a new seventh mission designed to mitigate damage from the American tariffs, according to reporting by the Fortaleza daily O Povo. The confederation has also counseled caution on invoking Brazil’s economic reciprocity law, arguing that escalation would compound the harm to exporters. Nova Industria Brasil, launched in January 2024 and two years old this January, mobilizes roughly 750 billion reais in credit lines to modernize Brazilian industry through 2033, and cheaper capital goods imports interact directly with that agenda: a factory drawing subsidized credit to automate still needs the robot, and in many niches the robot is not made in Brazil.
Importers and their advisers, for their part, have spent the year navigating the whiplash. Law firm commentary on the February episode, including client alerts from Machado Meyer on Resolutions 852 and 853, focused on transition risks for goods in transit and on the compliance burden of matching shipments to fast-moving tariff texts. The consistent advice from the trade bar has been to verify the current status of every relevant nomenclature code before shipment rather than relying on rate tables even a few weeks old, guidance that the September package only reinforces.
The macro backdrop: American tariffs and forced diversification
No Brazilian trade measure in 2026 can be read in isolation from the state of the United States relationship. Since August 2025, most Brazilian goods entering the United States have faced a combined 50 percent tariff, the sum of a 40 percent country-specific measure and a 10 percent baseline reciprocal tariff, with exemptions for certain products. In mid-July 2026, following a yearlong Section 301 investigation into Brazilian digital trade practices, electronic payment services, tariff preferences, and anticorruption matters, Washington layered an additional 25 percent tariff on Brazilian imports, according to reporting by Al Jazeera and the Atlantic Council’s coverage of the dispute. Brasilia has so far declined to retaliate in kind, a restraint that industry groups including CNI have encouraged.
The export consequences have been material but uneven. Analysis by FTI Consulting found that the tariffs accelerated a diversification of Brazilian exports that was already underway. The energy and commodities news service CPG Click Petroleo e Gas reported that Brazilian exports set records in 42 country markets in 2025, that shipments to China reached 100 billion dollars with soybeans accounting for roughly a third, and that Germany displaced the United States as the top buyer of Brazilian coffee, while United States-bound exports in affected categories fell sharply.
Diversification on the export side has an import-side mirror, and that is where the September duty cuts fit. If Brazilian industry is to reorient toward Asian, European, and Latin American markets, it needs competitive production costs, and imported capital equipment is one of the few input costs the government can cut by decree. The ex-tarifario program has also become a quiet channel for sourcing diversification: exemptions are origin-neutral, so a zeroed duty on a German machining center or a Chinese laser welder benefits whichever supplier wins the order. The United States International Trade Administration has explicitly flagged the program as a valuable tool for American exporters seeking to compete in Brazil, a reminder that even amid the bilateral tariff confrontation, American capital goods can still enter Brazil duty-free where an exemption exists.
The European dimension adds a further layer. The European Union and Mercosur concluded negotiations on their long-delayed association agreement in December 2024, and the ratification process has continued through 2026 amid resistance from some member states. If and when the agreement enters into force, tariffs on a large share of EU-origin capital goods will phase down on a negotiated schedule, gradually reducing the relative value of case-by-case ex-tarifario concessions for European equipment. Until then, the exemption list remains the fastest route to duty-free entry for European machinery, and European suppliers of agricultural equipment, trucks, and industrial machinery are among the most frequent beneficiaries of new entries such as those published this week.
What it means for global exporters and supply chains
For foreign equipment manufacturers, the September package is an unambiguous commercial opening, but one that rewards administrative attention. Each new exemption is written around a specific technical description, and qualifying for the zero rate requires that the imported good match that description precisely. Suppliers whose products fall under the 491 modified capital goods entries, the 34 IT and telecom lines, or the reworked automotive list should obtain the exact “ex” texts from the new resolutions and confirm classification with Brazilian counsel or brokers before quoting landed costs. A machine that misses the description by one parameter pays the full Common External Tariff.
Timing matters equally. Because the Global Trade Alert entries record the measures as not yet in force at announcement, and because recent concessions have carried validity windows ranging from 120 days to two years or more, exporters should verify both the entry-into-force date and the expiry date for each relevant line. The two-year extensions contemplated by Resolution 951 suggest the government intends to give equipment buyers longer planning horizons, but past practice shows that exemptions can be revoked mid-stream if a domestic producer demonstrates equivalent national production. Foreign suppliers competing against emerging Brazilian production in their niche should assume their exemption is contestable and monitor Camex proceedings accordingly.
For the truck, trailer, and agricultural machinery segment, the changes formalized through Resolution 955 arrive during a difficult stretch for Brazilian farm equipment demand, which has been suppressed by high domestic interest rates and tighter farm credit. Duty-free entry for specialized self-propelled machines, such as the olive harvesters and robotic reapers cited by LegisWeb, targets precisely the high-technology niches where domestic manufacturers do not compete, and it should marginally lower fleet renewal costs for Brazilian agribusiness heading into the 2026-27 planting cycle. European, Japanese, and Chinese specialty equipment makers are the most likely near-term beneficiaries; American manufacturers remain eligible on equal terms, since Brazil has not imposed retaliatory duties on United States goods.
For Brazilian manufacturers and their global customers, the cumulative effect of the year’s measures is a modest but real reduction in the capital cost of modernization at a moment when the country’s export mix is being forcibly rearranged. Multinationals with Brazilian plants, particularly in automotive, food processing, and machinery assembly, can use the new exemptions to refresh production lines at lower cost, which in turn affects sourcing decisions about which products to build in Brazil for the South American market. Supply chain planners weighing Brazil against Mexico or Southeast Asia for regional production will note that while Brazil’s headline tariffs remain high by global standards, the effective rate on state-of-the-art equipment is frequently zero for those willing to work the exemption process.
What to watch next
Three threads deserve monitoring through the fourth quarter. First, the formal entry into force of the September measures and the publication of the complete product lists, which will settle exactly which nomenclature codes and technical descriptions benefit. Second, the fate of exemptions expiring on September 9, 2026, part of the cohort created when 614 capital goods were added to the list earlier in the year, whose renewal or lapse will signal how the committee is balancing fiscal pressure against modernization policy. Third, the broader policy environment: progress on EU-Mercosur ratification, any movement in the United States dispute, and the design of CNI’s proposed seventh mission for Nova Industria Brasil will all shape whether Brazil’s current mix of selective protection and selective liberalization holds.
For now, the direction of the September 4 package is plain. Where Brazil does not make the machine, Brasilia is increasingly willing to let it in free of duty, and it is adjusting the list at a pace that demands weekly attention from anyone selling capital equipment into South America’s largest market.