Europe is set to respond angrily to the latest moves by the US Congress to widen retaliation in trade disputes over bananas and beef.
EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy on Thursday criticised proposals, approved by the Senate later that day as part of the Africa-Caribbean trade bill, to rotate sanctions regularly to penalise other EU goods, saying the move could make disputes more difficult to resolve.
The so-called "carousel" retaliation, designed to spread sanctions more widely across European export industries, threatens to complicate recent efforts by US President Bill Clinton's administration and Brussels to settle outstanding trade differences and avoid new ones.
"If the American administration were to move to a carousel system, then we reckon this would be a very bad way of going about things," Mr Lamy said in Brussels.
"One of our main objectives in our multilateral negotiations with the Americans is to move from megaphone diplomacy to telephone diplomacy and we certainly can't afford to take steps backwards," he added.
Previously, the Commission had said Brussels was examining whether carousel retaliation violated WTO rules.
President Clinton has fought hard for the Africa-Caribbean bill, his first substantive trade legislation since 1994, and is unlikely to veto the bill.
Following the President's expected approval, the bill would require the US trade representative to rotate retaliation lists against countries that failed to comply with WTO rulings against them, starting 120 days after the list took effect and every 180 days after that.
The requirement could be waived only if the US trade representative judged that a country was close to compliance, or agreed with the original petitioner in a WTO case that the retaliation list did not need to be revised.
Charlene Barshefsky, the US trade representative, has previously insisted she already has the authority to rotate retaliation lists.:
