| Statement by Dr. ZHANG Xiangchen (Minister and DPR of China to the WTO) on the US Omnibus Appropriation Act of 2009 |
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| Tuesday,March 17,2009 Posted: 18:16 BJT(16 GMT) |
| From:wto Article type:Original |
March 12, 2009
Mme. Chair,
I come to this meeting with a specific instruction from Beijing to make an intervention under this item and express the serious concern of the Chinese government about of the US Omnibus Appropriation Act of 2009.
On March 10th, the US Senate approved this Act with a section 727, which constitutes a clearly discriminative measure against imports of poultry from China. This section reads: “none of the funds made available in this Act may be used to establish or implement a rule allowing poultry products to be imported into the United States from the People’s Republic of China.”
Mme. Chair,
I know that everyone in this room is expert of WTO rules and it is needless to explain why such discriminative measure is forbidden by the WTO. Perhaps we could send to the Institute of Training and Technical Cooperation of the WTO Secretariat a copy of this section, which would serve as a perfect example for their training courses. I believe that any trainee with a preliminary knowledge of the WTO disciplines will tell that this section violates the basic rules of the WTO including the MFN. We strongly disagree with the US view that this section is in conformity with the WTO SPS Agreement since we believe that the issue here is irrelevant with the SPS Agreement.
Actually this section is not new. There was a section 733 of the same language in the US Omnibus Appropriation Act of 2008. On that section, China has been repeatedly expressing our serious concern with the US both bilaterally and multilaterally. Most recently at the US Trade Policy Review of June 2008, the US answered that “Section 733 is set to expire at the end of fiscal year.” We took that answer with goodwill and believed that, with the expiry of the section 733, such discriminative practice would come to its end. However, the only result is that we have a section 727 of the same language and the same discriminative nature.
Mme. Chair,
The questions I would ask my US colleagues, colleagues of other Missions and the Secretariat are:
What should we, China and the US, do to avoid the reappearance of another section 7xx next year?
What should we, all Members, do to prevent such discriminative practice from undermining the multilateral trading system and sending wrong signal to the outside world at this critical juncture of global crisis?
How should we live up to our commitments repeatedly make both here at the WTO and at the G20 to resist trade protectionism?
Thank you, Mme. Chair.
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