(pangasius-vietnam.com) On 4th September, 2013, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued the preliminary results of the ninth antidumping duty administrative reviews (POR9) on certain frozen pangasius fillets imported from Vietnam. The period of review (POR) is August 1, 2011 through July 31, 2012. In its preliminary decision, DOC imposed an antidumping duty of US$0.42 per kilogram and US$2.15 per kilogram to two mandatory respondents. Other separate rate respondents have to pay US$0.99 per kilogram.
Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) expresses our discontent with the DOC’s sudden decision to change the surrogate country and also voices protest against the DOC’s preliminary results of POR9. Earlier, VASEP and Vietnamese pangasius companies subjected to the higher antidumping duty filed a lawsuit against the DOC’sfinal decision of POR8 to U.S. Court of International Trade (U.S. CIT), asking to reconsider the accuracy of DOC’s calculations and requiring DOC to select a comparable surrogate country to recalculate the tax. CIT accepted the lawsuit and asked U.S. Customs to stop imposing the POR8 antidumping tax to subjected companies until the Court issues its final decision.
The unfair decision of selecting Indonesia as the primary surrogate country for its calculations of Vietnamese pangasius inputs, led to unreasonably high levels of the antidumping duty on fish exporters. Indonesia has been rejected in the DOC’s previous reviews due to lack of pricing data and basic financial data. Furthermore, Indonesia only imported frozen pangasius fillets from Vietnam and had no exports to other countries.
Such decision runs against the DOC’s previous decision on August 11, 2012, which announced list of 6 countries selected to be surrogate one in calculating the antidumping tax in the POR9. Indonesia was not listed among them. The DOC itself declared that Indonesia is not “economically comparable” to Vietnam for more than half of the POR’s criteria.
Bangladesh is chosen as a primary surrogate country by DOC for its calculations in previous consecutive reviews because the country is farming Pangasius Hypophthalmus in water ponds for commercial fish products like Vietnam. Producers in the two countries have the same production cost and revenue. Therefore, there’s no reason to chose Indonesia to be primary surrogate country and there’s no bases to affirm that its data are reliable to be used in the ninth review as well as in the final decision of POR8.
The DOC’ primary decision is clearly affected by political lobby Catfish Farmers of America (CFA). The punitive results cause doubt among Vietnamese enterprises about the fairness of the process and the alleged “neutral” nature of the DOC decision-makers.
The DOC’s decision risks negatively impacting bilateral ties between Vietnam and the U.S. VASEP requires the DOC to reconsider its decision and consistently select Bangladesh as surrogate country for its calculations of Vietnamese pangasius inputs in the POR8 and POR9 as what it did in the previous reviews.