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China group due to check NW wheat, promote trade
Saturday, February 12, 2000
BLOOMBERG NEWS
BEIJING -- China probably will send a grain-industry delegation to Portland in less than two weeks to promote permanent normal trade relations and to inspect wheat quality.
The delegation may check the quality of Pacific Northwest wheat as soon as Feb. 20, after an agreement in December to end a ban on imports of wheat from the area because of a fungus found there, a U.S. trade official said yesterday.
From there, the team will fly to Washington, D.C., to lobby for normalized trade, which would end the yearly review of China's trade status with the United States and give the country freer access to U.S. markets, the trade official said.
"We certainly expect there will be Chinese delegations related to the WTO accession agreement and the agricultural-cooperation agreement headed to the U.S. in both the near term and later this spring," said Matt Weimar, Asia regional director for U.S. Wheat Associates.
In November, the United States and China signed an agreement on China's entry into the World Trade Organization under which Beijing said it will set bulk grain import quotas with a tariff of 1 percent. China said it will impose the low tariff on up to 7.3 million tons of wheat in its first year of WTO membership, expanding to 9.64 million tons by 2004.
Although talk of the trip by Chinese grain officials to the United States is generating excitement in export circles about possible sales of U.S. wheat to China, Weimar said it was all "speculation" and that there were no announced buying plans of which he was aware.
Authorities in China were unavailable to comment on the trip as government offices were shut in celebration of the Lunar New Year.
China's wheat imports fell to just 448,000 metric tons in 1999, down from 1.5 million tons in 1998, because of domestic oversupply. Wheat imports stood at 1.9 million tons in 1997 and 8.3 million tons in 1996, according to China's General Administration of Customs.
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