Business
Challenge to US on shrimp antidumping duty
  • | dtinews.vn, nld | September 13, 2016 12:33 PM
Vietnam is preparing to sue the US Department of Commerce for its latest antidumping duty administrative review on Vietnamese shrimp, with higher duties proposed for any shipment from the Southeast Asian country, according to General-Secretary of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Processors Truong Dinh Hoe.


Hoe told the Nguoilaodong Newspaper on September 12 that Vietnam could send the complaint to the US Court of International Trade within 30 days.

“Vietnamese shrimps are not being dumped into the US market so we will ask for the 0% tariff on our products,” Hoe stressed.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade's Competitive Management Department, the tenth administrative review saw antidumping taxes levied on certain frozen warm-water shrimp from Vietnam for the period of review from February 1, 2014 to January 31, 2015.

The review was requested on 51 Vietnamese shrimp exporters, including two mandatory respondents, Minh Phu Group and Soc Trang Seafood JSC, according to Tuoi Tre Newspaper.

Mandatory respondents are exporters selected for individual investigation by the department as part of its countervailing duty review, whereas exporters that are not initially chosen for investigation but wish to participate, and are accepted by the US, are voluntary respondents.

According to the final results of the tenth review, Minh Phu Seafood Corporation, who is a leading Vietnamese exporter of frozen warm water shrimp, does not dump its shrimp into the US and therefore was no longer subject to the antidumping duty. Meanwhile, voluntary respondents are subject to an antidumping duty of 4.78% which is more than four times higher than the official 0.91 percent set in the ninth review.

The Competitive Management Department explained that the US was switching to a new calculation methodology, which is called differential pricing, which was the reason for this high duty rates during the tenth review. Another reason is their selection of the values and a surrogate country.

"The US used to choose Bangladesh as a surrogate country to calculate antidumping tariffs for Vietnamese exporters in their previous administrative reviews," the department explained. "But in the tenth review, although Bangladesh was still chosen as the main surrogate country, they also used some of the values of India to calculate the inputs."

Tran Van Linh, chair and general director of Thuan Phuoc Seafood & Trade Company said that Vietnamese shrimps exporters have faced difficulties competing with others in the US market due to high prices.

"Now with this increased antidumping duty, we may have to switch to other markets," Linh said.

Leave your comment on this story