Brussels, 12/04/2016 (Agence Europe) - During a meeting in Strasbourg on Monday 11 April with European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs Elzbieta Bienkowska, France's Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron called on the Commission to give its verdict by the summer at the latest on the most recent anti-dumping procedure opened in February against Chinese steel products.
While he hailed the Commission's recent efforts announced in March to shorten anti-dumping procedures by a month (see EUROPE 11512), Macron nevertheless said that these efforts were not enough, given the current situation in the European steel sector which has been hit very hard by Chinese competition. “France will have big problems if these procedures last eight months. The latest procedures were opened in early February. I need decisions on this by this summer”, he said. “So we must continue to put pressure on the Commission so that the procedures move more quickly”, he added.
Having initiated, along with six other European ministers for industry, a letter to the Commission, asking it to cut these delays as soon as possible (see EUROPE 11485), Macron calls for the example of the USA to be taken and for the European model to be overturned. “The Commission today wants to prove that there really is a dumping practice and to establish all the facts and details of this, when we simply need to establish the risk of injury, exactly as the Americans do, which would enable us to move much more quickly”, he said.
Macron also advocates imposing higher customs tariffs on Chinese products that benefit from dumping. “When we took measures after the procedures opened last May, we set up tariffs of 20% on average. The USA set up tariffs of 300%. We are not credible”, he said, criticising the Council of the EU's blockage of the plan to modernise trade defence instruments (see EUROPE 11114).
On Monday, Bienkowska reiterated the Commission's mid-March proposal aimed initially at cutting anti-dumping investigations by a month, before cutting them by two months once the review of the trade defence arsenal has been concluded. At the Commission's DG Trade, the European model is considered much more balanced than the American model because it takes account not only of the steel producers but also of the industries that use the steel, and of the consumers (see EUROPE 11527).
OECD conference on 18 April on steel overcapacity. Overcapacity in the steel sector will be the focus of a high level conference organised by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is to be held in Brussels on 18 April and attended by representatives from 30 countries.
US Steel criticises European negligence. Mario Longhi, the head of American company US Steel, accused Europeans on Monday of having treated China too considerately, resulting in the current steel crisis - particularly in the UK. “The Europeans have been more negligent than anybody. For them to be (…) considering granting as a fact market economy status to China when you have all the evidence in place to deny them that right it's just ridiculous”, he said in an interview with the Financial Times. The Europeans' policy is “blowing up in their face”, he said. US Steel has a large factory in Slovakia. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens with Emmanuel Hagry)