The Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) has
voiced its objection to the anti-dumping tax rates on imported
Vietnamese tra fish imposed by the preliminary decision of the US
Department of Commerce (DOC) after the ninth administrative review
(POR9).
In its September 5 press release, the
association asked the DOC to keep Bangladesh as the proxy country
for calculating the input costs of Vietnamese tra fish products in the
final decision of the POR8 and 9 as in previous years.
Under the DOC’s preliminary decision announced on September 4,
Vietnamese frozen tra fish filets exported to the US between August
1, 2011 and July 31, 2012 will be subjected to anti-dumping taxes.
Accordingly, the anti-dumping duties on products
of two mandatory reviewed companies will be of 0.42 USD/kg and 2.15
USD/kg respectively and for other voluntary companies it will be 0.99
USD/kg.
The VASEP said it was unhappy with the DOC’s sudden
decision to use a different surrogate country to calculate the cost of
Vietnamese fish products in the POR9.
Earlier, the
VASEP and tra fish exporters to the US filed a petition to the US Court
of International Trade (US CIT) over the final decision of the DOC’s
POR8, asking the court to consider the accuracy of DOC’s calculation and
force it to reselect a more suitable benchmark country and recalculate
the anti-dumping taxes.
The CIT accepted the
petition and asked US Customs to temporarily stop collecting
anti-dumping taxes from Vietnamese exporters under the POR8 decision
until the court makes its final decision.
According
to the VASEP, the decision to choose Indonesia as the reference
country has led to irrationally high anti-dumping tax rates as approved
in the preliminary decision of the POR9.
In
previous PORs, it was the DOC that always objected to Indonesia as
the third country as it has insufficient price data and basic financial
parameters. Indonesia, in fact, is an importer of Vietnamese frozen
tra filets, not a tra fish exporter.
The decision
also goes against the one made by the DOC on November 8, 2012 when it
announced the list of six countries to be used as proxies for the POR9,
which excluded Indonesia, as the country is not “economically
comparable” to Vietnam based on more than half of POR’s criteria,
according to the association.
The VASEP further said
that the DOC consecutively chose Bangladesh as the benchmark
country for valuing the input of Vietnamese tra fish in the previous
PORs. Bangladesh also produces commercial “hypophthalmus” tra fish
and breeds them in ponds like Vietnam, and production costs and
revenue from tra fish in Vietnam and Bangladesh are nearly the
same.
As a result, there is no reason for
Indonesia to become the proxy country, or is its data more reliable
to be the basis for the preliminary decision of the POR9 as well as the
final decision of POR8 , according to the VASEP.-VNA