Vietnam has challenged U.S. anti-dumping measures against Vietnam’s exports of fish fillets, a filing published by the World Trade Organization showed on Friday. Vietnam says Washington has broken WTO rules in the way it has imposed punitive tariffs on Vietnamese fish it claims are being ”dumped, or sold at an unfairly cheap price, on the U.S. market. U.S. imports of fish fillets from Vietnam have grown from $100 million in 2007 to more than $520 million in 2016. That made Vietnam the third-biggest U.S. supplier after Chile and China and the U.S. the top export market for Vietnamese fish. The United States has 60 days to settle the complaint, or Vietnam could ask the WTO to adjudicate. Washington has faced a slew of trade disputes over its use of anti-dumping duties in the past two decades, and has lost many of them after its calculation methods were found to be out of line with WTO rules. Earlier this week, the WTO published a wide-ranging Canadian trade complaint, lodged in December, against the U.S. use of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs. The United States called that complaint a “broad and ill-advised attack” that could cause a “flood of imports from China and other countries”. The Vietnamese complaint was the fourth dispute initiated by Vietnam since it joined the WTO in 2007. Two of its previous complaints took aim at U.S. anti-dumping actions against Vietnam’s shrimp exports. The long-running shrimp battle finally ended in 2016 when the United States agreed to remove duties… [Read full story]
India and Vietnam should jointly work to bring down US anti-dumping duties on their shrimp exports, an Indian newswire quoted a Vietnamese official as saying Tuesday. Tran Duc Minh, Vietnamese deputy trade minister, said both countries were major exporters of shrimp, and the duty imposed by the US was simply a protectionist measure to shield its shrimp farmers, the newswire Expressindia reported. Minh was speaking on the sidelines of a seminar in Kolkata on Vietnam-India business relations organized by the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce & Industry. US shrimp farmers were much richer than their Vietnamese and Indian counterparts, Minh…... [read more]
The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to launch a formal investigation on Monday into whether Chinese companies shipped steel through Vietnam to avoid import tariffs, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the matter. The development comes after lawyers for four U.S. steel producers said in September that they would file petitions with the department alleging that Chinese competitors diverted shipments to Vietnam immediately after the U.S. government set preliminary anti-dumping duties on their stainless steel. The U.S. duties, ranging from 63.86 percent to 76.64 percent, were proposed after preliminary findings showed the imports were…... [read more]
Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are trade barriers that restrict imports to protect and maintain domestic production and consumers as well. Vietnamese exporters always face NTBs when they export to big markets like the US, Japan and South Korea. Vietnam is seeing its difficulties and limitations in coping with NTBs to three key exports: apparels to the US, footwear to the EU and seafood to Japan. According to US market specialists working at the General Department of Vietnam Customs, Vietnamese firms usually face with the following technical standard systems when they sell their products to these markets. Quality standards: The quality of apparel…... [read more]
Plastic bags pictured in a store. Vietnamese polyethylene retail carrier bags will continue to face countervailing duties in the US. Photo: sangnghiep.comThe US continues to impose countervailing duty (CVD) as well as old duty rates on polyethylene retail carrier bags (plastic bags) from Vietnam after the first sunset review on the duty in May, reported Vietnam Competition Authority.According to the final results of sunset review, the US Department of Commerce held that revoking the CVD on plastic bags from Vietnam was likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of countervailing subsidies. The tax rate would remain 52.56 percent for Advance Polybag…... [read more]
In its preliminary decision, the DOC concluded that all imports of steel nails of less than 12 inches from Vietnam will be subject to an 8.35% countervailing import duty rate, with a de minimis exception for small inconsequential imports that are too small to require collection.The petitioner for these investigations was Mid Continent Steel & Wire, Inc. of Missouri which lodged a countervailing duty complaint against steel nail imports from Vietnam, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Oman and Taiwan (China).The DOC began its investigation on June 18, 2014 on steel nails imported January 1-December 30, 2013.This has been the fifth countervailing duty…... [read more]
