EBB will challenge EU reduction on Argentinian biodiesel duties

 

The European Union is lowering import duties on Argentinian biodiesel after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled against initial measures taken against cheap imports from the South American country, Reuters reports.

The European Biodiesel Board, an EU producer group, is now preparing to put together a new challenge against the cheap imports, according to Reuters.

Anti-dumping duties have been cut to between 4.5% and 8.1%, the EU has stated. This follows a WTO ruling that the European Commission’s decision to set initial rates of 22-25.7% in 2013 was ‘unjust’.

The reduced rates will apply to imports from the Argentinian biodiesel exporters Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, as well as Molinos Rio de la Plata.

Olivier Prost, a lawyer representing the European Biodiesel Board (EBB), told Reuters that the group would ask the Commission to consider Argentina’s imposition of an export duty on soybeans, a biodiesel feedstock, as illegal.

“What we are going to do is probably launch a type of proceeding to challenge the distortions that result particularly from the differential export tax,” he said.

The EBB is a non-profit organisation of biodiesel producers. It currently counts 80 members across 21 EU member states, representing 75% of the EU’s biodiesel output.

In July, the EBB released a statement warning that reducing the import duties on Argentinian and Indonesian biodiesel imports could have “a dramatic impact” on 120,000 jobs in the EU. The release warned that “the EU’s excellence and worldwide leadership in biodiesel would be forever lost at the advantage of two countries (Argentina and Indonesia).”

According to the Reuters article, the EU will keep in place tariffs of between 8.8% and 20.5% for Indonesian biodiesel, which were also set in 2013.

Indonesia has a case pending with the WTO, and the Commission has therefore not proposed lowering import duties on the product.

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