America’s legal system could grant South Africa’s poultry industry a reprieve from the threatened annual quota of dumped US chicken that South Africa has offered to United States trade negotiators.
This is the view of FairPlay founder Francois Baird, assessing the potential impact of US court rulings invalidating President Donald Trump’s tariffs on US trading partners.
“South African chicken producers have not had much luck when it comes to their own government’s support, but they may yet get lucky thanks to American courts,” Baird wrote in an article in Business Day.
The US Court of Appeals last week ruled that President Trump did not have the powers he had assumed to impose the tariffs, and the issue now seems headed to the Supreme Court, the country’s highest legal authority. Tariffs remain in place in the meantime.
If the Supreme Court also rules against the Trump tariffs, Baird wrote, then all current deals, including with South Africa, would be dissolved, and tariffs collected would have to be refunded.
It could also end the offered extension of the US import quota, which Baird said “sacrificed South African chicken on the altar of trade, without consulting the (poultry) industry”.
The quota of chicken imports free of anti-dumping duties was forced on South Africa during negotiations in 2015 to extend South Africa’s benefits under the AGOA trade deal. As the quota was conditional on benefits to other South African industries, which have now been lost, it should fall away. However, it has been resurrected in South Africa’s offer to US negotiators.
“The DTIC proposal to allow American chicken producers to dump 72,000 tonnes per year in South Africa is bound to be hugely harmful to the biggest sector in South African agriculture, putting at risk not only thousands of chicken jobs, but also grain and soya farmers and other businesses in the chicken value chain.
“It borders on reckless, when considering that in many rural areas, chicken farmers are the largest employers,” Baird said.
“The ground has shifted politically, and SA Poultry may yet get lucky thanks to American courts, to emerge bloodied but alive from the South African government’s unnecessary trade and political collisions with President Trump,” Baird concluded.
