California Olive Industry Celebrates WTO Ruling Affirming US Antidumping Duties on Spanish Olives
A California table olive industry trade association declared victory over a recent World Trade Organization challenge to U.S. antidumping and countervailing duties on ripe olives from Spain following the WTO's ruling, declaring that the trade organization gave "the outcome of which will enable the U.S. Government to continue effectively enforcing the U.S. olive trade remedy cases," it said in an emailed press release Nov. 30. Despite the WTO panel's finding that some aspects of U.S. countervailing duties violate WTO rules (see 2111190028), the Olive Growers Council of California said the WTO ruling was a win for the California olive growers, and that the antidumping and countervailing duties will help the growers stabilize and rebuild.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“Make no mistake, the enormous olive subsidies being provided by the European Union (EU) and Spain, and the deliberate efforts to dump ripe olives from Spain into the U.S. market, have allowed the Spanish industry to take almost all our U.S. foodservice business and put our retail business at risk," said Michael Silveira, chairman of the Olive Growers Council of California. "Today, the antidumping and countervailing duties imposed by the U.S. Government have given our family olive farmers and thousands of allied workers hope for the future and time to revive the industry. The U.S. Government’s ongoing enforcement -- together with our own industry-led modernization investments -- provides an important government-industry model for how to break the cycle of unfair foreign trade practices and rebuild high-quality, environmentally-friendly American production and American jobs.”
While the WTO did uphold U.S. antidumping duties on Spanish ripe olives, it found the U.S. erred when finding that subsidies given to Spanish raw olive growers under the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy were specific to the olive grower and countervailable. The industry association said that the WTO ruling gives the U.S. a path to "elaborate its subsidy analyses and maintain countervailing duties."