WASHINGTON, March 22: The Bush administration on Friday said it has excluded another 295 foreign steel products from tariffs President George W. Bush imposed one year ago to help the struggling steel industry get back on its feet.
The action spares approximately 400,000 additional tons of steel from the duties, or about one-tenth of the 4 million tons sought by US steel-consuming companies and foreign steel producers in the latest round of exclusion requests.
Altogether, those companies submitted 661 requests last November for additional products to be excluded from the tariffs, which originally ranged from 8 percent to 30 percent.
In a prepared statement, the Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition said the new exclusions would provide some relief but failed to ensure that most small- and medium-sized steel-consuming businesses would have access to reliable and competitively priced supplies of steel.
Virtually every steel-consuming company needs competitively priced steel, at the right time, the right supply, and with a consistent quality, said William Gaskin, chairman of the coalition’s Steel Task Force. Exclusions do not address these basic needs for steel consumers.
In a joint news release, the US Trade Representative’s office and the Commerce Department said 208 of the 295 additional steel products excluded on Friday were done without objection from the US steel industry.
Nancy Gravatt, a spokeswoman for the American Iron and Steel Institute, said US steel producers still would prefer as few exclusions as possible, but worked with the Commerce Department to address customer concerns about supply availability.
In the first year of the steel tariffs, which began March 2002, the Bush administration excluded 727 foreign steel products representing about 3 million tons.
The Bush administration said its main concern in granting the exclusions was to ensure adequate domestic supplies. Many of the exclusions were for “small-volume niche products,” it said.
The action came one day after the United States automatically lowered its steel tariffs for the second year of Bush’s three-year import relief programme.
The top rate of 30 per cent on plate, hot-rolled steel, cold-rolled steel, coated steel, tin mill products, hot-rolled bar and cold-finished bar declined to 24 per cent on Thursday.
Tariffs for other products also declined, with the bottom rate of 8 per cent on imports of stainless steel wire dropping to 7 per cent for the second year. In addition, a tariff-rate quota for slab steel was raised to allow 5.9 million tons to come into the United States without paying a 24 per cent duty.
The tariff-rate quota for the first year allowed 5.4 million tons to enter without paying a 30 per cent duty.
Tariff levels will fall further in the third and final year of the programme which begins in March 2004.
The Bush administration said it would accept new exclusion requests in November and make a decision on those products in March 2004, the second anniversary of the tariffs.—Reuters