Duties on N.Z. lamb sought

Press, 21 April 1984, Page 1

Duties on N.Z. lamb sought

NZPA staff correspondent Washington

The American Lamb Company of California has filed its expected petition seeking countervailing and anti-dumping duties on New Zealand lamb imports. The petition accuses the New Zealand Government of subsidising exported lamb by 40 per cent and alleges that it “is being dumped in the United States market at prices below the costs of production by margins ranging from 26 per cent to 458 per cent.” Robert Wray Associates, the law firm representing American Lamb and “other members of the United States industry” said it had evidence that the New Zealand Lamb Company “dumped unusually massive volumes of legs in the Los Angeles and New York markets during the 1983 Easter season at predatory prices, breaking the market and materially injuring the industry.”

The petitioners believed an investigation would make it amply clear that the New Zealand lamb imports threatened “even greater injury unless New Zealand subsidies are countervailed and the predatory pricing offset by anti-dump-ing duties,” said Wray. Those charges were dismissed yesterday by Mr Graeme Lindsay, the executive vice-president of the New York-based New Zealand Lamb Company, the United States arm of Devco, as “nonsense.”

Mr Lindsay replied that “their own economists point out that the major problem with the lamb market in the United States in the last 12 months has been caused by their own production increases being put on a market where demand was soft. There is no question that the Americans have had a difficult financial time selling lamb in the last two years, but so have we.”