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To: llamaphlegm who wrote (16991)	9/12/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: llamaphlegm	Respond to of 164684

this would be funny if it weren't one more event helping to push china to devalue (not a good thing for anyone's economy). nytimes.com By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL EIJING -- To halt the invasion of a devastating insect pest, the United States said Friday that it would ban the import of all Chinese goods shipped in raw wood packing material, a move that is likely to strain China's economy -- as well as U.S.-China relations. Officials said wooden crates and pallets used to ship Chinese goods to North America sometimes harbor the comely but voracious Asian long-horned beetle, which has emerged from the packing material after it arrived in warehouses to kill trees in five locations around New York and Chicago in the last year. The ban is likely to result in delays or higher costs for a third to half of China's $62 billion in exports to the United States -- at a time when China has already seen its export growth slowed by weak economies in other Asian countries. U.S. officials acknowledged during a news conference conducted by video hookup in Beijing that the restrictions, scheduled to take effect in 90 days, will cause pain for Chinese business -- and for American importers as well. But they said that when Agriculture Department inspectors found the beetles boring through maple trees in suburban Chicago neighborhoods this summer, they felt compelled to act. "We are very concerned," Dr. Isi Siddiqi, deputy assistant agriculture secretary, said during the news conference. "These new regulations are based on sound science and a real threat to U.S. environmental resources." Government studies estimated $138 billion of damage to the U.S. economy if the beetles, which have no natural enemies in the United States and cannot be eradicated with pesticides, move to U.S. forests. Dan Glickman, the agriculture secretary, said the action should not be seen as a trade sanction, adding that trade between the United States and China had grown to $80 billion this year from $5 billion 15 years ago. "Our intention here is not to disrupt trade, but to lock out an unwanted guest that poses a serious economic and environmental threat," Glickman told an audience in Chicago. The new regulations require that goods from China be packed in non-wood packing material or wood that has been treated with heat or fumigation to kill the insects. It was not clear whether Chinese exporters would be able to adopt new practices in the next 90 days or how much their costs would rise. Although the Chinese government had no official comment on the ban, Chinese officials have been aware of the looming possibility for weeks and were hoping to avert it. "If the ban is imposed, China's exports will suffer, because a considerable amount of our export trade is packed in raw wood," one Agriculture Ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Chinese government has recently issued billions of dollars in Treasury bonds in an effort to stimulate the economy and insulate it against a slowdown caused by economic crises elsewhere in Asia or the summer's devastating floods in China. Although China's exports are still growing, the rate of growth has slowed this year, and a reduction of its thriving export sales to the United States would be hard to bear. Siddiqi said the U.S. government had been discussing the problem with China's quarantine agency for many months, ever since the beetles were discovered in warehouses. He stressed that the United States hoped to cooperate with the Chinese to minimize disruption to trade. "Look, this is not an action we wanted to take, but this bug is eating trees in people's back yards and their front yards," said one U.S. official in Beijing. "Inspectors from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service are knocking on doors and saying, 'We have to cut down all the trees around your home."' In the United States, the beetles have so far been detected in wood packing from China in warehouses in 14 states. They have been found free in the environment in and around Chicago as well as in Brooklyn and Amityville, N.Y. The beetle was identified as the Asian long-horned beetle by a Cornell University entomologist, Richard Hoebeke, after Brooklyn residents noticed mysterious half-inch holes in their trees. The beetle's larvae drill through trees' bark into the wood, where they undergo metamorphosis into large black beetles with bright white spots and long elegant antennae. In Brooklyn, as in three subsequent infestations, inspectors had to order the destruction of all affected trees, since there is currently no other way to control the pests. U.S. officials disagreed somewhat over just how much of China's exports were packed in untreated wood, with estimates ranging from 30 percent to more than 90 percent, and on how difficult it would be for Chinese to adjust to the new requirements. Ma Zhongmei, an official at the export department of North China Air Transportation Co. in Beijing, said about one-third of her company's customers packed their goods in raw wood. She added that this sort of packing was most commonly used for high value items, like large machines and factory equipment. "These customers could have used plywood, but they chose raw wood to reduce cost," she said.