BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – The E.U. doubled the import duty for maize (corn), sorghum and rye to €10.95 ($13.10) per tonne due from €5.16 per tonne set on Aug. 8.

The change was needed, the E.U. said, because of the weaker U.S. dollar and the lower price for U.S. corn. The August tariff was the first since Nov. 8, 2014, and was triggered by a global record harvest expected for 2016-17, which resulted in a large supply and lower prices.

The E.U. has bound duties for all cereals set under the GATT agreement. However, for some cereals, the applied rates are different from the bound one. The duty is fixed on the basis of the difference between the effective E.U. intervention price for cereals multiplied by 1.55 and a representative cif (i.e. cost, insurance and freight) import price for these cereals at the port of Rotterdam.

This revised tariff, triggered by an automatic mechanism that calculates import duties, will avoid putting European producers at a disadvantage, E.U. officials said.

Published on Sept. 1 in the Official Journal, the update is based on Regulation (EU) No 642/2010, which lays out how the three cereals’ import duties should be obtained by calculating the difference between a European reference price and the U.S. corn price.