Trade remedies and safeguards are key exceptions to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) principles of non-discrimination and transparency through binding commitments on tariffs and in other areas, and can broadly take the form of anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard measures. Each of these measures fulfils a different purpose and represents a permitted response by countries to different trade-related threats.

In the case of the aircraft disputes (‘Measures affecting trade in large civil aircraft’), with Airbus and Boeing underlying the disputes raised by the European Union (EU) and United States respectively, these matters triggered the start of formal processes through the WTO late in 2004. Fifteen years later, in 2019 (and then in 2020) countervailing actions were authorised under different WTO decisions of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.

This Working Paper reviews recent developments in the large civil aircraft dispute and outlines how the resultant trade remedies cover products in industry sectors not related to the underlying dispute, and how new punitive tariff barriers to trade in affected products can potentially have impacts – and provide opportunities – for producers and exporters in third countries. More specifically, the focus is on trade remedies against certain wine tariff lines, impacts on trade flows since the imposition of trade remedies, and the potential opportunities that this may provide South African wine exporters, given the particularly favourable preferential market access that South Africa enjoys to the US market.

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