LETTER: Consumers pay for questionable trade rulings

Donald Mackay’s excellent article on the imposition of steel import duties refers (“Downstream steel sector owes Macsteel a very expensive bottle of whisky”, June 29).

This comedy of errors culminated, at least temporarily, in a successful challenge by Macsteel to a very questionable extension of a safeguard duty, which terminated when the minister offered a settlement. Suffice to say, import tariffs of some sort have been implemented and amended with great regularity by the International Trade Administration Commission (Itac) of SA, with the support of trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel, in an attempt to manipulate the steel industry in favour of dominant player ArcelorMittal SA (Amsa).

The inefficiency in implementation and administration of the raft of tariffs, as well as the failure to adhere to requirements and timelines as stipulated in the relevant acts, would have done justice to a Keystone Cops series.

Those in charge of our inconsistent and often poorly conceived trade policies are the same people who have ridden roughshod over imported chicken products for years. There has been no consistency in interpretation and application of rules and regulations applied in nine different tariff, dumping and safeguard duty investigations spanning the last decade.

Ultimately, whether the product is steel, chicken or something entirely different, most of these questionable rulings are inflationary and financed by the end user, the consumer, who is very possibly poor and unemployed. Trade policies are serious and should always be carefully crafted and sensibly and sensitively implemented, and certainly not amended annually.

After all, they are our economic mirror to the world, which at times must wonder whether we actually think before we act. You couldn’t make this stuff up. But that’s the problem — in SA we actually do.

David Wolpert
Rivonia

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