The United States said on Friday it was "very disappointed" with parts of a draft proposal to revamp global anti-dumping duty rules, but hoped to improve the text before a final deal was reached.
"While the US is very disappointed with important aspects of this draft text, we believe it provides a basis for further negotiations," the US Commerce Department and Trade Representative's office said in a joint statement.
"As we proceed with those negotiations, we will be fully committed to preserving the strength and effectiveness of US trade remedy laws," the government agencies said.
The statement did not specify the problems the United States had with the draft text released earlier on Friday in Geneva and a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department was unable to provide additional details. However, many US lawmakers strongly oppose any weakening of the United States' ability to impose duties on goods it believes are unfairly priced or subsidised.
At the same time, changing those rules is a top priority for many countries who feel the United States has unfairly used its trade laws to keep out their products. WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said the draft text released by Uruguay's WTO ambassador Guillermo Valles Galmes was a good basis for further talks. Valles chairs the "rules" negotiations covering dumping, subsidies and fisheries subsidies.
"The texts are ambitious and balanced in all three areas they cover and they will enable negotiators to work in a more intensive manner in the coming weeks," Lamy said. One troublesome area for the United States might be a provision limiting the life of any anti-dumping measure to 10 years. At present, the measures must be reviewed every five years but the importing country can extend them indefinitely.
Other provisions would tighten the use of anti-dumping duties, a change favoured by consuming industries in the United States but not by steel companies and union workers who are advocates of strong trade remedy laws.
In one concession to Washington, Valles' proposals would allow importers in certain circumstances to use a controversial method known as "zeroing" to calculate anti-dumping duties. WTO panels have struck down the practice, which allows administrators to ignore any above-market prices paid for imported goods when determining if dumping has occurred.
Washington insists zeroing is allowed under WTO rules and senior congressmen have said any trade deal emerging from the Doha round of global trade talks must recognise it. The text marks an advance for the long-running Doha round, launched six years ago to boost the world economy. So far, negotiating texts have been issued only in the two key areas of agriculture and industry.
WTO ambassadors agreed on Friday to aim to finish the negotiations by the end of 2008, with the next major stage, revisions to the agriculture and industry texts, coming in January or February of next year.
Valles will hold the first negotiations on his text, which reflects many of the proposals in talks since the round was launched in 2001 in the Qatari capital, on December 12-14. He said he would hold further talks in late January and mid February before revising the text. Valles said he did not expect anyone to agree to anything in the texts at this point.
"These texts are not the end of our negotiating process but only the first step in a new phase involving further intensive discussions within the group," he said. The proposals by Valles also allow an importing country to extend anti-dumping measures to other countries, if the target of anti-dumping measures is circumventing them by going through third countries, meeting a US and European Union concern. And in the interests of transparency they would create regular reviews of countries' dumping measures.
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