WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New negotiating texts on anti-dumping and subsidies released by the World Trade Organization (WTO) reflect how far the negotiations are from being an acceptable basis for conclusion for the United States. As 2008 comes to an end, the WTO dispute settlement system continues its unacceptable pattern of rewriting the rules of trade remedies.

While the Doha round of negotiations has been plagued by an inability of WTO members to resolve differences in agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA), the problems that the U.S. is experiencing in the current WTO system were further emphasized earlier this month through the release of (1) yet another in a long series of dispute settlement decisions attempting to limit the ability of Members to collect antidumping duties to offset 100 percent of the dumping found and (2) a new paper by the Chair of the Negotiating Group on Rules.

"Unfortunately, 2008 will go down as another deeply disappointing year for businesses and workers who depend on a rules-based system that has been negotiated by their governments," commented David A. Hartquist, Executive Director of the Committee to Support U.S. Trade Laws (CSUSTL). "Instead, the system is imposed by faceless bureaucrats serving on the WTO Appellate Body contrary to the limitations of the WTO system." CSUSTL is an ad hoc coalition representing American manufacturers, food producers, and workers who are committed to preserving the U.S. trade laws as a vital protection against foreign trade practices.

"The long series of decisions in recent years from antidumping disputes, subsidies disputes and safeguard disputes shows an institutional bias within the WTO Appellate Body against Members using rules that have long been recognized as a basis for governments having the flexibility to liberalize trade," said Terry Stewart, Chairman of the CSUSTL Membership Committee. "Domestic producers and workers who depend on conditions of fair trade have been appalled at the series of poorly reasoned decisions that seem determined to eliminate the ability of countries to use trade remedy laws in fact. We appreciate the Administration's repeated call on the WTO to limit the excesses of the Appellate Body and its determination to address some of the most egregious examples of creating obligations in the context of the ongoing Doha negotiations," he added.

"In the Trade Act of 2002, the Congress made clear that it had deep concerns about the Appellate Body imposing obligations on the United States that don't exist in the WTO agreements and emphasized the importance of preserving the ability of the U.S. to effectively enforce its trade remedy laws," said Hartquist. He went on to add, "The recently released paper from the Chair of the Negotiating Group on Rules shows how far removed the negotiations are from anything acceptable to Congress or to those who must rely on U.S. trade remedy laws. The paper, which attempts to identify areas where there is some agreement (but acknowledges that none of the suggested changes has consensus), fails to achieve any of the mandates from the Congress and, in fact, would make cases even harder to bring and increase their costs."

"CSUSTL is in total agreement with the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), that it is hard to imagine the Doha negotiations ever concluding without clarification of the historic rights/practices of countries like the United States to capture 100 percent of the dumping found in investigations and reviews," said Hartquist. "There are literally dozens of problems with the 1994 Uruguay antidumping agreement created by an overreaching Appellate Body that simply must be corrected through the negotiations for there to be any chance of obtaining industry and worker support for the Rules portion of the negotiations."

Roger Schagrin, Chair of the CSUSTL Government Relations Group added, "We will work with the incoming Administration, as we have done with the Bush Administration, and with the new Congress to see that these problems are addressed and that the promise of the 2002 Trade Act to curb the Appellate Body excesses and restore the balance of rights the United States negotiated in the Uruguay Round is in fact achieved."