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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (11539)	11/25/2001 4:10:40 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

what we've got is huge dismay at the general ignorance among the US population of this issue - which hurts them as well, homebuyers, homebuilders, distributors, etc [Home Depot has been vocal against the lobby, others as well] ... but of course to lesser degree individually than the whole towns the lobby would wipe out here Marcos, i am glad i figured out what is bugging you. i invest in paper stocks from time to time so i have read a bit about the issue. but i surely do not have the details you do on the tariff. i do know there is an argument for our side. it is the justification the international trade commisssion used to impose the tariffs. i also know the tariffs are or were about 3x higher for indonesia, china and the phillipines than for Canada. there are definitely two sides to this issue. part of the argument used to impose the tariff is... U.S. mill owners say they can't compete because Canadian mills receive substantial government subsidy in the form of below-market timber. About 95 percent of forests in Canada are government-owned, and lumber companies there enjoy long-term leases and harvest rights at one-third to one-quarter the price U.S. timber companies pay. Competition from subsidized Canadian companies has plagued U.S. producers since the mid-1970s. But after Canada ended voluntary limits in 1991, lumber exports took off. To fight back, the Coalition For Fair Lumber Imports, representing U.S. sawmills and forest landowners, filed suit before the International Trade Commission (ITC) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, charging that the Canadian industry receives unfair subsidy and was dumping lumber on the U.S. market at less than the cost of production. To avert a punitive 15 percent tariff the ITC was prepared to levy, Canada signed the U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement, which limited exports to the United States from British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and Ontario to 14.7 billion board feet a year - still an enormous amount by previous standards. [In 1986, Canadian imports were 28 percent of U.S. consumption. Since the agreement, they've held steady at about 34 percent.] Even under the agreement, though, U.S. producers continued to suffer. Since 1996, an estimated 52 mills in Oregon and Washington, citing competition from Canadian softwood lumber as a factor, have closed or cut back production, with 4,900 jobs lost. Plus, its critics say, the agreement has been hard to enforce. Denny Scott, assistant director of the Portland-headquartered Western Council of Industrial Workers, a division of the Carpenters Union, said Canadian lumber companies have circumvented the agreement by calling lumber something else, such as "truss parts" or "pre-manufactured studs for electrical conduits." "They would put a notch in them and call them 'rafters,'" Scott said. i expect the "free trade area of the americas" (FTAA) agreement currently ahead of schedule for a 2005 completion will resolve this matter in Canada's favor. unclewest