BRUSSELS, March 20. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, has advanced this Monday that he will urge the European Commission to resort again to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reactivate the recognition panel on the situation of black olives so that The United States withdraws the tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on imports of this product of Spanish origin since 2018.
Although, as Planas recalled this Monday in Brussels, the United States “approved at first”, after the Joe Biden administration accepted the WTO ruling that declared these tariffs illegal, this has not yet been complied with. result.
The WTO agreed, in its ruling last November, with the Spanish black olive producers and ruled that the 25% tariffs applied by the United States to the export of this product to the North American market since 2018, imposed by the administration of Donald Trump, violate the rules of the multilateral institution.
The United States imposed this tariff on the sale of black olives, arguing its dominant position in the market that restricted the business of some national producers. The Community Executive defended that aid to Spanish producers of black table olives are part of the aid decoupled from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), allowed by the WTO for not having any interrelationship with production.
“This is a Spanish and European issue to the extent that we are talking about the transfer of CAP aid to the agricultural sector as a whole”, stressed the minister.
