New twist in the fries war between Belgium and Colombia

LThe WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) “accepted a request from the European Union to establish a panel to determine whether Colombia has complied with a previous WTO ruling” condemning it, said 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.

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 a provisional procedure – known as a “provisional multi-party arrangement”. providing for a procedure for appeal by arbitration” (MPIA in English) – which a group of countries put in place within the framework of the WTO to be able to continue to resolve their trade disputes.

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A first commercial conflict

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.

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.