Colombia. Since last Friday, June 1, Colombia already has to pay the new tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum from the United States. Despite the efforts of the Ministry of Commerce to be excluded, this country was included in the list of 28 nations that must pay this increase, in which Mexico is also located.
As reported by the newspaper El Espectador, this measure affects a Colombian sector that had been presenting good figures. According to DANE, in 2017 alone Colombia exported to the United States more than US$213 million in metals and their manufactures (with a growth of 5.7%) and another US$33 million (growing 30%) in the category of iron and steel smelting.
Likewise, another worrying issue is that the new tariffs imply that millions of tons of steel, which cannot afford to enter the United States, will seek new destinations, and Colombia would be one of the destinations that could receive that material.
The Andi has been warning that only because of the restriction that China would have, there would be 12.5 million tons that would look for a new destination like Colombia. That amount of steel is more than 6.6 times the national production, which would put in serious difficulties the metalworking sector that generates more than 90,000 jobs.
MinCit indicated that "The dialogue with the Trump administration is not closed. We will continue to manage the exclusion of our products from tariff measures. Finally, we continue to monitor steel and aluminum imports into the country and apply measures and monitoring to prevent technical smuggling of these products. We are prepared to minimize the impacts of phenomena such as the diversion of trade of large exporters from other countries affected by this decision."
Source: El Espectador.
