17 Apr The Lumber Fight: Another Round Goes to Canada
Last week, the Appellate Body of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body issued a ruling finding that the U.S. government improperly calculated the level of duties it imposed on Canadian lumber, in the long-running never-ending struggle between U.S. and Canadian lumber producers.
The gist of this dispute is that the U.S. is claiming the right to impose duties on Canadian lumber on the theory that it is being subsidized. The WTO has supported this basic U.S. position, but it has slapped down the U.S. process for determining the duties that should be applied as well as the U.S. methods for actually calculating the duties. So this is really about numbers – not principles or law – which suggests that there is a deal to made somewhere.
I can’t resist making one more quick somewhat unfair comparison. I note that Canada filed its notice of appeal of the lower dispute settlement body decision in November 2005. This appellate decision was released…five months later, thus giving a final determination in proceeding that technically began in February 2005. Now that’s fast work on a pretty complex case. Perhaps the WTO could send out trainers to the world’s other international tribunals?
Yes, it is an ‘unfair comparison.’ In the long-term and big picture, the WTO has the considerable weight of the Washington Consensus of Anglo-American capitalism providing an ample store of direct and indirect incentives to accomplish its goals. In our day and age the collaboration of governmental and commercial interests will let nothing stand in the way of deregulated international capital flows, the promotion of private overseas investment and increased global trade, for such is the (in Marxist terms, ‘inevitable’) manic globalizing economic logic of contemporary capitalism. The other international tribunals are working within social and political matrices and networks of considerably smaller magnitudes of power characterized by coefficients of density (hence inertia) and adverse exogenous variables.