WASHINGTON, D.C. — Commissioners of the U.S. International Trade Commission gave a rough ride last week to arguments that imports of Canadian feed wheat and durum are disrupting U.S. agriculture programs.
However, they also sharply questioned Canadian Wheat Board officials on why the CWB is refusing to provide selling prices in response to commission requests.
When CWB representative Harvey Brooks said the board is a “commercial entity” that needs to keep information confidential, ITC commissioner Janet Nuzum replied that the agency has a tradition of respecting the confidentiality of sensitive business information.
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Brooks maintained that transaction prices are confidential and extremely sensitive, arguing that the information is the property of buyers in the U.S. and it should be up to them to release information to the ITC.
Trade lawyer Richard Cunningham, representing the CWB and other Canadian agricultural organizations, said the ITC survey asked for landed prices, which are “downstream” from CWB. He said the CWB sells through accredited agents and may not know the final landed price of a shipment.
That drew skepticism from Nuzum and commissioner David Rohr, who warned that the ITC can make a decision based on “adverse inference” — in other words, it could make the assumption that the CWB is refusing to supply information because the information would hurt its case.
Recommendations to be made
The Washington hearing was the last of a series of ITC public hearings on the issue. The six commissioners are to file recommendations to president Bill Clinton by mid-July on whether he should impose quotas on imports of Canadian wheat because they cause “material interference” with U.S. farm programs.
In questions after formal arguments by representatives of the U.S. agriculture department and several U.S. farm groups, the commissioners noted that key U.S. farm programs concerning wheat are working as expected — no new wheat acres have been idled, wheat prices are well above the level where farmers would access the loan program, and government wheat deficiency payments are below levels of recent years.
“We need to have some evidence, we need to have something other than speculation,” Nuzum told deputy administrator Neal Fisher of the North Dakota Wheat Commission. “You’re a little weak on the evidence.”
Earlier, she and Rohr complained to officials of the U.S. department of agriculture (USDA) that department briefs filed over the past few months were weak and almost completely devoid of analysis supporting USDA’s call for quotas on Canadian wheat. Only immediately before the April 28 hearing did USDA file something more substantive, they complained. Since they had no time to analyze the latest brief, they said they would file most of their questions in writing later.