The senators from Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana asked the commerce secretary to reverse a preliminary decision to reduce the "Vietnam-wide" antidumping rate for Vietnamese catfish exporters that haven't been assigned their own rate to 14 cents per kilogram, from a previous $2.39/kg rate.
Trade ministers from Japan, the U.S., the EU, the U.K., France, Canada, Germany and Italy said they will work to reach an agreement on World Trade Organization reform "with the view to having a fully and well-functioning dispute settlement system accessible to all members by 2024." The binding appellate level of dispute settlement at the WTO has been defunct since late 2019, because the U.S. blocked all appointments to the appellate body.
Trade lawyers and importers are wondering how the anti-stockpiling element of a two-year pause on trade remedy circumvention deposits will be enforced.
Canada and the U.S. issued statements about a panel decision on softwood lumber under NAFTA's AD/CVD dispute chapter, but the antidumping duty case, which was brought years ago under NAFTA, not under its successor, is not posted on the USMCA Secretariat's docket, and neither country would share the ruling.
Antidumping and countervailing duty proceedings at the Commerce Department will be temporarily stopped in the event of a U.S. government shutdown due to a failure in Congress to appropriate funds, lawyers from global firm Veneable wrote. Enforce and Protect Act allegations of AD/CVD evasion also won't be investigated during the shutdown, according to the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America.
Canada is choosing to call for a binational panel to determine whether the countervailing duty order on its softwood lumber exports is fair, but is challenging the antidumping order at the Court of International Trade.
Four witnesses asked Congress to pass Level the Playing Field Act 2.0, a proposal that would change trade remedy laws in favor of domestic manufacturers, at a House hearing called the "Chinese Communist Party Threat to American Manufacturing."
Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies expect the U.S. will get "a taste of its own medicine” when China appeals its loss over Section 232 retaliatory tariffs at the World Trade Organization, adding that China likely won't have to drop the tariffs since there is no appellate body to take that appeal.
A World Trade Organization dispute panel rejected China's claim that its retaliatory tariffs in response to Section 232 tariffs were justified because the U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs were a safeguard in disguise.
Anabel Gonzalez, one of the World Trade Organization's deputy directors-general, said in a farewell column that although progress is being made on improving the WTO, "governments face some tough choices in the months and years to come to deal with pressing matters that, if left unchecked, could seriously erode the multilateral trading system and damage trade as an engine of growth and prosperity."