AIIS Supports Call for Urgent Action in the Global Forum

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): A new statement on March 6, 2018, by Angel Gurría, the Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), calling on the Global Forum on Excess Steel Capacity (GFSEC) to take “swift and tangible action in 2018” to resolve the problem of excess capacity in the global steel industry was met with enthusiastic support by the American Institute for International Steel (AIIS), the nation’s leading organization representing the steel supply chain.

“Secretary General Gurría’s statement is important in two ways,” noted Richard Chriss, President and International Trade Counsel of AIIS. “First, it signals a continuity of leadership with regards to this key issue under the Argentinian G20 Presidency. Second, it stresses that our approach to resolving the global excess capacity problem must be multilateral, collaborative, and long-term in its perspective. This is exactly the right approach, and the only way we will achieve meaningful results,” Chriss stated.

“However, just at the time when countries should be thinking constructively about possible ideas and initiatives to reduce excess steel capacity, now they may also have to come to grips with the most serious challenge to global market stability in decades. The prospect of new, unilateral, globally applied United States steel trade restrictions is a real threat to the Global Forum’s work. It undermines multilateral cooperation. It makes productive collaborative effort more difficult. And it creates an incentive for engaging in damaging, short-term counter-reactions like retaliation.

We still have time to refrain from actions that will impair the ability of the United States to effectively lead the work of the Global Forum, which the United States helped create,” Chriss concluded.

Courtesy: AIIS