Canada Confident Any Tariffs or Quotas Won't Apply to Canadian Blueberries
As the International Trade Commission begins its investigation into safeguard actions to protect U.S. blueberry growers, a Canadian Embassy spokesperson notes that the North American trade treaty requires that Canada be excluded from a global safeguard tariff if “Canadian imports are not contributing to serious injury or any threat of serious injury to the U.S. domestic industry. This is the case for U.S. imports of Canadian blueberries. As a result, Canada expects that the United States will not apply any safeguard tariff or quota on blueberry imports from Canada.”
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The U.S. has not always honored this element of NAFTA, and Canada brought a dispute over this question when Canadian solar panels were hit by Section 201 tariffs (see 1807230029).
The large majority of complaints at seasonality hearings held in August by the Commerce Department and other agencies, concerned Mexico, not Peru, Chile or Canada (see 2008200039), though Fred Leitz, a Michigan farmer of blueberries complained that Canadian wages are lower than his wages. He said he stopped selling squash and some other produce due to Mexican competition, but did not mention Canadian blueberries specifically as a category-killer.
New York Farm Bureau's David Fisher also testified, “There is concern that unfair subsidization of Canadian produce is occurring, which makes it possible and profitable for Canadian farmers to ship and sell produce in the U.S. either as country export or through individual provincial programs.”