China-Threats to take United States to WTO.
CHINA-WTO COMPLAINT AGAINST US PROTECTIONISM.
China, which posted a record drop in exports last month, will file a World Trade Organization complaint against U.S. measures that it says have effectively banned chicken imported from the Asian nation.
The U.S. rules on chicken imports are "unfair and malicious," China’s Ministry of Commerce said today in a statement posted on its Web site. The Asian nation will file a WTO complaint against the U.S. and "retains the right to take further measures," it said.
China’s complaint against the U.S. measures on chicken imports would be the fourth it’s filed since joining the WTO in 2001 and the first since the nation’s exports began four consecutive months of declines in November. The world’s most populous nation lost 3 million jobs in the fourth quarter as economic growth hit a seven-year low, further straining the ruling Communist Party’s ability to maintain social stability.
"What the U.S. has done amounts to cheating," said Gong Guifen, director of the poultry division of the China Animal Agriculture Association, by telephone from Beijing. "This is not equal trade."
China last month urged the U.S. government to rescind a section of its 2009 spending plan that stipulates no funds made available under the Omnibus Appropriations Act may be used to establish or implement rules allowing the import of Chinese poultry products.
’Protectionist’ Measures
The rule is "discriminatory and protectionist," Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian said in a statement posted to the Chinese government’s Web site on Feb. 28
The China Chamber of Commerce of Imports and Exports of Foodstuffs, Native Produce & Animal By-Products said March 6 that the Asian nation should ban imports of chicken from the U.S. in response to the limitations passed in the spending bill. The U.S. is the largest exporter of chicken to the China, according to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.
The U.S. congress in 2007 stopped the Agriculture Department from moving forward with a proposed rule that would have allowed cooked poultry from China to enter the U.S.. market, according to the government agency.
China allowed U.S. raw poultry to enter its market after it was given assurance that Chinese cooked poultry would be allowed access to the U.S. market, China Animal Agriculture Association’s Gong said. Imports of U.S. poultry rose to 611,000 tons last year from 407,000 tons in 2006, Gong said.
Falling Exports
Chinese exports of chicken meat may decline 24 percent from a year earlier to 215,000 metric tons this year, according to estimates by the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Foreign Agricultural Services. The nation exported 12 tons of chicken meat to the U.S. last year, the agency said.
The Chinese government said today that exports in February fell 25.7 percent from a year earlier. That’s the biggest decline since 1995, the earliest date for which Bloomberg has data.
China’s trade surplus, which hit a record $40 billion in November, fell to $4.8 billion last month, the customs bureau said. The Asian nation’s trade surplus had led U.S. lawmakers to accuse the Chinese government of artificially holding down the value of its currency and helped make China the subject of more U.S. WTO complaints than any other nation.
The U.S. in January filed a WTO complaint against the European Union’s decade-long ban on imports of American poultry, saying the policy violates global trade rules.
