June 16, 2003, 9:54PM Border trade ties coming undone U.S. seeks decision in beef, rice dispute By JENALIA MORENO and DAVID IVANOVICH Houston Chronicle
Trade ties between the United States and Mexico grew more tense Monday as the Bush administration turned to the World Trade Organization to settle a dispute over rice and beef exports to Mexico. Agriculture has proved to be a sensitive part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, with U.S. farmers complaining about Mexican imports of tomatoes, sugar and avocados since the accord went into effect in 1994. This latest quarrel results from two anti-dumping actions taken by the Mexican government. Last June, Mexico ruled American farmers were selling long-grain milled rice cheaper in Mexico than they did in the United States, a practice called dumping. And in April 2000, Mexico imposed anti-dumping duties on U.S. beef. Pressured by farmers who complain they cannot compete with efficient American operations after many tariffs were eliminated this year, the Mexican government in recent years has slapped dumping duties on several U.S. agricultural exports, including beef, rice and apples. This issue is important to the U.S. agricultural industry because Mexico is the largest export market for both rice and beef in terms of quantity. In these cases, U.S. trade officials question Mexico's methods for determining whether its beef and rice producers were injured by American exports. Mexico, for instance, was supposed to collect data from three years but provided information from only parts of three years. Washington also complained about the age of the trade data in question, noting the information was collected more than a year before the actual dumping investigation was launched. And U.S. trade officials questioned whether the information collected really supports the conclusions Mexico has reached. U.S. beef producers shipped 350,000 metric tons or $829 million worth of beef products to Mexico last year. Mexico imports about 20 percent of its beef consumption, according to the Mexican government. When investigating the dumping charges, Mexican officials required American producers to provide pricing data. Those that did not respond, typically the smaller producers, were deemed guilty of dumping. "Just because they didn't have the wherewithal to supply the price data to Mexico, they were essentially guilty by association," said Gregg Doud, chief economist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. In what Doud called a "preposterous" finding, companies that weren't even in business at the time of the investigation are deemed guilty of dumping, because they didn't demonstrate during the probe that they had not been dumping onto the Mexican market.
