U.S. Trade Harassment Continues

On September 13, the North Dakota Wheat Commission announced that it had filed anti-dumping and countervailing duty petitions demanding import duties be imposed on Canadian wheat.

This is the tenth American challenge on Canadian wheat in the last decade. Not a single one of the previous challenges has been successful. However, each unsuccessful challenge eats up resources both for the Canadian government and the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB).

The North Dakota challenge is predicated on two things: that the CWB dumps lower-priced wheat into the U.S. market and that Canadian wheat producers are unfairly subsidized through the existence of the CWB. Both charges are completely false - indeed, a recent U.S. trade study found that Canadian durum was priced higher than American durum in the U.S. market 59 months out of 60.

In terms of production subsidies, the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average the subsidies received by American wheat producers at $108 Cdn per tonne, compared to only $31 per tonne for Canadian farmers. These figures do not include the recently passed U.S. Farm Bill, which guarantees American wheat producers billions more in subsidies.

And the CWB does not subsidize Western Canadian producers at all - it simply acts as the sole marketer of their wheat and barley, which sometimes guarantees them higher returns than those received by American grain producers, who are at the mercy of various U.S.-based transnational grain merchants.

However, as Canadians have already experienced, U.S. trade challenges often have little or no basis in fact. It is simply part of a pattern of harassment and intimidation designed to protect U.S. markets from foreign competition at all costs, while ensuring American products flood into other markets on an unrestricted basis. This was the raison d'etre for the Americans in entering first into the Free Trade Agreement with Canada, and then expanding that agreement to include Mexico under NAFTA. It is certainly the main factor behind the Americans' push to establish the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.