In an effort to curtail the country's rocketing steel capacity, China's State Economic & Trade Commission (SETC) has set its annual crude steel output guideline for 2003 at 190m tonnes. The production ceiling allows for a nationwide increase of under 10m tonnes this year. But traders and producers maintain that such a policy will prove almost impossible to implement. Previous efforts by Beijing to curb production have met with little success: last year the SETC set a figure of around 170m tonnes, but total crude steel output reached 181.55m tonnes, up almost 20 percent on 2001.
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