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Gustav Brink
Journal of World Trade
Volume 59, Issue 2 (2025) pp. 257 – 282
httpss://doi.org/10.54648/trad2025018
Abstract
South Africa’s poultry
industry has been fighting a war on imports since 1999. The battles in this war
include the use of anti-dumping, significantly increased customs duties, SPS
measures in the form of full country-bans against outbreaks of highly
pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), and a free trade agreement safeguard measure
against imports from the European Union (EU). Anti-dumping duties against the
United States have been in place since 1999 and were recently extended to 2029,
while anti-dumping duties are also in place against imports from Brazil,
Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. Customs
duties on whole birds have been increased from 27% to 82%, and for frozen
bone-in portions from 18% to 62%. Once there is an HPAI outbreak in a country,
all imports from that country are banned without the application of
regionalism, and the ban sometimes remains in place as long as two years after
the outbreak has been brought under control. South Africa also imposed a free
trade agreement safeguard for four years on poultry imported from the EU. All
of these measures have combined to make poultry one of the most protected
industries in South Africa.
Keywords
anti-dumping, SPS, HPAI, safeguards, customs duties, WTO, trade protection, trade remedies, poultry
Extract
In recent years, the world’s largest economies and traders – the United States, China, and Japan – have chosen to use measures affecting international trade as a means to achieve political objectives in contravention of the rules of international economic law and the practices of international trade established over several decades. Since the end of World War II, the world economy and international trade have rapidly expanded and prospered by achieving a degree of separation between international trade and political struggles under the rule-based international trading system, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization. Thus, the recent misuses of trade measures by the world’s largest traders are alarming, because they undermine the stability of the world trading system, which has been maintained for the past several decades. This article accounts politically-motivated trade measures (‘PTMs’) recently invoked by the United States, China, and Japan, assesses their incompatibilities with the rules of international economic law, and also examines the risks that these PTMs pose to the world trading system.