US trade officials said the seventh and final round of exclusions for 2002 brought foreign steel products exempted from the tariffs to 727. Those were culled from more than 1,300 requests. The exclusions cover about 3.2 million tonnes of foreign steel products, the Commerce Department said.
The US last night excluded another 178 foreign steel products from the disputed tariffs it imposed in March, whittling away at the scope of the duties and potentially easing tensions with the EU, Japan and other trading partners.
US officials denied that threats of retaliation from the EU and Japan influenced their decision on which steel products to exclude. Nevertheless, "the overwhelming majority of those granted were for Europe and Japan", a US aide said.
The EU said it was examining the new exclusions and would offer an "appraisal" today. An official at the Japanese embassy in Washington said the latest exclusions brought the total for Japan to 550,000 tonnes, which he called "a pretty big amount".
President George W. Bush imposed duties ranging from 8 to 30 per cent in March to help the domestic steel sector restructure after more than 30 bankruptcies. At the same time, the Bush administration issued exemptions for about 12 per cent of the products that could have been covered by the duties and said it would consider additional exemptions for products not made in the US or not expected to be made domestically in a reasonable timeframe.
The administration says the steel duties, to be phased out over three years, are legal under international rules that let countries restrict imports temporarily to help battered industries get back on their feet. The EU, Japan, China, Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand challenged the US action at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), saying it went beyond what was allowed under WTO rules. Brussels and Tokyo threatened to retaliate unless the US compensated for lost trade by lowering tariffs on other goods.
Last month, the EU delayed until late September a decision to slap retaliatory duties on more than $300 million (€309 million) worth of goods to give member-states more time to assess the benefits of the exclusions announced by the US. Tokyo also put plans to retaliate on $4.88 million of US goods on hold after the Bush administration exempted some of its steel products from the tariffs earlier this summer.
The Japanese government will revisit the issue now that the final amount of exclusions are known, the embassy said.
The White House has faced conflicting pressures. US steel-consuming firms want product exclusions, saying the tariffs have boosted domestic steel prices more than expected, while US steel producers say too many exclusions will undermine the effectiveness of the tariffs.
Mr Nancy Gravatt, a spokeswoman for the American Iron and Steel Institute, said US producers were "disappointed at the large number of exclusions granted over industry objections". But she conceded the remaining tariff coverage appears still strong enough to provide much-needed protection against low-priced imports from abroad.
US trade officials said they expected the protection left would be enough to help the steel industry regain its footing. The still-fragmented US steel industry must issue an initial report in September on the progress it has made toward restructuring.
