Bill Proposes Ending AD/CV Duty Collection in Newsprint Case

A bipartisan bill led by Maine senators Susan Collins (R) and Angus King (D) calls for the end of cash deposit collections on newsprint and a stay to final determinations in the antidumping and countervailing duty cases. Both would be halted until after a study on the economics of newspapers and newsprint is concluded, and until President Donald Trump still certifies that antidumping and countervailing cases against Canadian groundwood paper exporters is in the national interest.

The bill, introduced May 14, and also co-sponsored by two Democrats and seven Republicans, is called the PRINT Act, or the Protecting Rational Incentives in Newsprint Trade Act of 2018. Collins's office says the bill has been endorsed by printers and publishers who employ a total of more than 600,000 people. The top cash deposit rate on a company for the countervailing duty case is 9.93% (see 1801120008); most Canadian exports face a 22.16% antidumping cash deposit (see 1803160046).

Collins sharply questioned Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross last week over the impact of these duties on struggling small-town newspapers, and he sought to downplay them by noting that a small newspaper that spends 5 cents a copy on newsprint before the case began now spends 1 cent more. That is a 20 percent increase, so exactly what you'd expect from the widespread antidumping cash deposits, he said.

"Nearly all of the U.S. paper industry opposes these import taxes, including the large trade association representing the entire industry, the American Forest and Paper Association, because the Department of Commerce’s action threatens to decimate the paper industry’s customers and injure printers and publishers," according to the press release announcing the bill's introduction. "As a Senator representing one of our nation’s leading papermaking states, I have consistently fought for actions to ensure a level playing field for the domestic papermaking industry. In this case, however, one domestic mill owned by a venture capital firm appears to be taking advantage of trade remedies to add to its own bottom line, putting thousands of American jobs at risk," Collins said in the release.

The Committee to Support U.S. Trade Laws (CSUSTL), a coalition of unions, trade associations, law firms and companies that support trade enforcement, decried the bill. "While Senators sponsoring the bill can be credited with concern about newspaper publishers, it simply cannot be the trade policy of the United States to allow an entire productive sector to be deliberately wiped out by foreign unfair trade practices in order to grant to its customers access to artificially low-priced inputs from abroad," their press release said. They called the bill a profound threat to the AD/CV duty enforcement regime.

The bill is a "brazen, unprecedented and unwarranted attack on U.S. trade laws" that "attempts to inject politics into a fact-based administrative process which is designed to help U.S. companies compete with foreign producers which do not abide by the rules of trade," said Skip Hartquist of Kelley Drye, a member of the CSUSTL executive committee. Thomas Sneeringer, a longtime steel lobbyist who leads CSUSTL, said that if this bill were to become law, "senators should expect to be petitioned by downstream consumers in every dumping and subsidy case going forward, insisting on equal treatment." Collins's office did not respond to that critique.