Australia rules out trade war retaliation with China despite barley tariff escalation
- China confirmed on Monday an 80.5 per cent tariff would be placed on barley exports from Australia after concluding its 18-month anti-dumping investigation
- Australia will consider taking the case to the World Trade Organisation, with almost 50 per cent of Australia’s barley exported to China
Australia has ruled out retaliating for China’s tariff of over 80 per cent placed on its exports of barley, insisting that the two countries have not entered into a trade war.
“No, there’s no trade war. In fact, even today, I think you have seen that there’s increased demand for iron ore out of China,” Agriculture Minister David Littleproud told various Australian media outlets on Tuesday. “The reality is they have used a process, quite fairly, around a belief that we have not been fair in our trade.”
As I originally speculated, the tariff has some connection with Australia’s position on Covid-19
The tariff, by nature, needed to be high enough to exclude Australian barley from the Chinese market, but the earlier 56.14 per cent would have sufficed, said Weihuan Zhou, an international economic lawyer at the University of New South Wales Law’s Herbert Smith Freehills CIBEL Centre
