The European Union wins a round in the trade war over frozen fries

Monday 25th November 2024 10:06 AM

The European Union obtained on Monday that the World Trade Organization verifies whether Colombia has indeed modified its anti-dumping duties on frozen fries from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. The WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) “has accepted a request from the European Union to establish a panel to determine whether Colombia has complied with a previous WTO ruling” condemning it , indicated a source close to the discussions.

This trade conflict has been under discussion at the WTO since November 2019, a year after Colombia imposed anti-dumping duties on frozen fries from the three European countries. But this file is moving forward despite the failures of the WTO appeal body.

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Torturous procedures

As this appeals body has no longer been able to process new appeals since December 2019 following the blocking of the appointments of judges by the United States, Colombia had filed its appeal via an interim procedure – known as a “provisional multi-party arrangement”. “Procedure for Appeal by Arbitration” (MPIA in English) – which a group of countries have put in place within the framework of the WTO to be able to continue to resolve their trade disputes. The French fries war is thus the first trade conflict to land at the MPIA discussion table.

In this case, the EU declared victory in December 2022 after a group of MPIA experts confirmed the majority of the findings made by the first instance body, emphasizing that the EU had established that Colombia “ had acted inconsistently with its obligations under various points of Article 3 of the Anti-Dumping Agreement.

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But “although the EU recognizes that Colombia subsequently implemented some of the conclusions” of the group of experts, “it considers that Colombia recalculated the dumping margin using erroneous methods, which resulted in the effect of artificially inflating the dumping margin for EU exporting producers,” explained the same anonymous source. Anti-dumping measures are authorized by the WTO, but only under certain conditions and are often the subject of challenges from the countries concerned.