TOKYO, Aug 1: Japan on Monday became the latest major US trading partner to impose sanctions to protest a US anti-dumping law, taking the unprecedented step of levying punitive tariffs on 15 US goods including steel. The tariffs will cost US exporters more than $50 million and be set at 15 per cent from September 1, in line with similar moves by Canada and the European Union against the so-called Byrd Amendment.

The law enacted in 2000 redistributes US levies on dumping — the selling of items abroad at lower prices than in the domestic market — to the US companies that complained. Critics say this puts exporters to the United States at a disadvantage.

Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said Japan had “been urging the United States repeatedly to abolish Byrd amendment to avoid the countermeasures but we see an extremely low possibility that it will be abolished in the (US) current fiscal year” which ends in September 2005.

“We hope strongly that the United States will take this decision by Japan seriously and scrap the Byrd Amendment immediately,” Nakagawa said in a statement.

It is the first known time that Japan, whose economy is built on exports, has imposed retaliatory sanctions on a country.

The goods subject to punitive tariffs include steel products, machinery parts, printing machines, forklift trucks and industrial belts.

With the retaliatory measures, Japan’s imports from the United States could fall by up to $52.1 million a year, the ceiling approved by the WTO, the ministry said.

The government decided to act against the law, named for US Senator Robert Byrd, after approval by its Council on Customs, Tariff, Foreign Exchange and Other Transactions.

Japan and six other countries — Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Mexico and South Korea — as well as the EU took the issue to the WTO, which last year authorized sanctions amounting to 72 percent of the sums reaped by the US law.—AFP