EU reheats frozen fries row with Colombia

Geneva: The EU on Monday got the World Trade Organization to check whether Colombia had indeed modified its anti-dumping duties imposed on imports of frozen fries from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.

The WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) "agreed to a request from the European Union for the establishment of a panel to determine whether Colombia complied with an earlier WTO ruling which faulted Colombia's anti-dumping duties," a Geneva-based trade official said.

The dispute 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.

Brussels said the measures announced by Bogota in November 2018 were unjustified and harmed European companies.

The case has moved forward under a temporary system set up by a number of countries in 2020 after a US-provoked collapse of the WTO's appeals body.

Washington, which had accused the WTO appeals panel of overreach, blocked the appointment of new judges, leaving it without the quorum of three needed to hear cases due to mandatory retirements.

The frozen fries dispute between the EU and Colombia was the first trade conflict to go before the multi-party interim appeal arbitration arrangement (MPIA).

"While the EU said it agrees that Colombia subsequently implemented some of the findings, the EU considers that Colombia recalculated the dumping margin using flawed methodologies resulting in artificially inflated dumping margin for the EU exporting producers," the Geneva trade source said.

"Colombia said it regrets the EU decision to request a compliance panel and that the new anti-dumping measure is fully compliant with Colombia's WTO obligations.

"Colombia took great efforts to explain its calculations to the EU and how they are compliant with WTO standards."

Anti-dumping measures are permitted by the Geneva-based WTO, but only under certain conditions and are often subject to challenges.