EU withdraws Anti-Dumping Duty on Pak products

ISLAMABAD: In a major development, the European Union (EU) has withdrawn the crippling Anti-Dumping Duty on Pakistan’s products of PET (Polyethylene terephthalate, a chemical used in making mineral water and beverage bottles), imposed five years ago, due to aggressive “trade diplomacy” of Pakistan.
The EU has formally notified the WTO where Pakistan had filed a case of unfair trade practices in March this year, against the 28-country European economic giant.
The withdrawal was billed as a big economic diplomacy success of the government trade experts. The unfair trade protection measure imposed by the EU in 2010 caused economic loss of approximately 300 million euros to Pakistan’s nascent chemical industry in the last five years as per conservative estimates by the commerce ministry. PET, popularly also called resin, is a bottle grade polyester chip, which is used in production of disposable PET bottles for mineral water and beverages.
Immediate negative impact of levy of this 35.39 euro per ton anti-dumping duty on Pakistani PET was that the country lost $90 million share in its export of this non-traditional product because Pakistani producers could not compete against world scale producers due to heavy import duty by the EU.
The EU decision to impose antidumping duty affected Pakistani producers of PET. In 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 the volume of imports of PET into the EU from Pakistan were respectively 44.2 thousand tons (45 million euros), 33.2 thousand tons (34 million euros), 84.9 thousand tons (with a value of 86.8 million euros), and 84.3 thousand tons (66.7 million euros).
Commerce Minister Khurram Dastagir personally dealt with this trade dispute. He took a bold decision of taking the matter to the WTO judicial adjudicating forum DSB.