H.R. 1988 contains a three-part strategy to reform and strengthen U.S. trade laws to provide more effective WTO-consistent remedies for U.S. workers, farmers and businesses against unfairly traded imports and damaging increases in imports. The bill will:

1. Strengthen section 201 to provide a more effective mechanism to obtain relief from serious injury caused by increased imports. Section 201 — the "safeguard" provision of U.S. law — provides a mechanism to address global increases of imports from all countries. H.R. 1988 will modify section 201 to:

replace the current, unnecessarily high standard for demonstrating a causal link between imports and serious injury to the U.S. industry; expand the availability of early and meaningful provisional relief; create for the first time a captive production provision for section 201; ensure that import surges can be addressed more quickly and effectively; and add common sense, WTO-based factors to the injury analysis conducted by the ITC.

2. Strengthen and improve the effectiveness of the antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) laws consistent with WTO rules. H.R. 1988 will modify U.S. AD/CVD laws to:

ensure effective application of the captive production provisions; correct deficiencies in U.S. law to ensure producers of seasonal perishable agriculture products are able to obtain adequate AD/CVD relief; ensure that the ITC can address cases in which price suppression, rather than increase in volume, is the key issue; require that the ITC evaluate whether an industry is in a vulnerable condition for reasons including prior waves of unfairly traded imports; clarify that the ITC need not determine the significance of imports relative to other economic factors when determining causation of material injury; improve and clarify rules that prevent circumvention of an AD/CVD order; and clarify how the Department of Commerce will measure the amount of a subsidy in certain instances.

3. Establish a steel import monitoring and notification program to help provide an early-warning mechanism with regard to steel imports.