A new report from the Latin American Steel Manufacturers Association (Alacero) warns that Latin America urgently needs to modernize and accelerate its trade protection mechanisms as steel exports from China continue to grow throughout the region. The Association compared Latin America's reaction with global practice and concluded that its existing instruments are too slow, too narrow, and insufficient to prevent market disruption amid persistent global overcapacity and increasingly assertive trade actions by leading economies.
According to the report, Latin America must adopt faster, broader, and more decisive trade defense strategies to cope with rising Chinese steel exports. While the United States, Canada, and the EU apply a combination of anti-dumping (AD), countervailing duties (CVD), protective measures, anti-circumvention actions, and immediate tariff measures, Latin America has relied primarily on lengthy and slow AD processes.
The consequences are significant: from 2010 to 2023, half of the growth in steel demand in Latin America, about 6.5 million tons, was filled with Chinese steel, indicating that trade in the region's protective mechanisms have not proved effective in containing the leakage flows created by stronger action in North America and Europe.China's global dominance in trade and exports
The report highlights the scale of China's presence in global trade enforcement efforts. Between 2010 and 2023, China accounted for 29.1 percent of all global BP cases in the steel industry, 45.9 percent of all cardiovascular diseases, and 76.5 percent of protective measures
. These shares reflect the exceptionally high level of subsidies in China's steel industry. A total of 6,181 global steel-related AD cases were reported during this period, with almost one third related to Chinese products.China's export expansion is described as structural. From 2010 to 2024, steel production increased by 57 percent, to 1.005 billion tons, or 53 percent of global production, and its foreign sales increased by 181 percent, to 117 million tons. In addition, China's shipments to Latin America increased by 233 percent to 14.1 million tons from 4.2 million tons.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that China's government subsidies are almost tenfold
