EUROPEAN UNION-US BEEF DISPUTE.
The United States and the European Union appear unlikely to resolve a two-decade-old beef dispute by an April 23 deadline, setting the stage for the United States to rotate $116.8 million in retaliatory duties to a new set of EU products, a U.S. industry official said.
"At this point, we have not been able to reach an agreement ... So, all indications are that carousel (retaliation) will go into place on the 23rd," John Reddington, vice president for international trade at the American Meat Institute, told Reuters in an interview on Friday.
The beef dispute goes back to the late 1980s, when the EU banned beef from cattle raised with artificial growth hormones, a common industry practice in the United States and Canada.
The United States formally challenged the EU’s ban in 1996 in one of the earliest cases it brought to the World Trade Organization. The WTO ruled in its favor and gave Washington the right to impose retaliatory duties on $116.8 million of EU products until Brussels agreed to lift the ban.