114 shrimpers dropped from US dumping review

The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has decided to drop 114 Indian shrimp exporters from the administrative review of the anti-dumping duty order.

In its recent decision, the International Trade Administration of DoC had dropped charges against these companies citing four reasons: the timely withdrawal of review requests by petitioners; confirmed statements of no shipments during the period of review (POR); inability to locate certain companies and, finally, because of the duplication of names of some companies in the review notice.

The US DoC had earlier listed two Indian companies, Falcon Marine Exports and Devi Marine Food Exports, as mandatory respondents for the ongoing second administrative review.

The second review will cover exports for a period of one year starting February 1, 2006 to January 31, 2007. The DoC will examine in detail shipments of the two mandatory respondents for giving the final verdict.

In April, 2007, the DoC had initiated an administrative review of 313 Indian companies based on the lists provided by the Ad Hoc Shrimp Trade Action Committee and Louisiana Shrimp Association (LSA), the original petitioners in the anti-dumping case. The department had also initiated reviews against shrimp exporting companies from Brazil, Ecuador and Thailand.

It had reviewed the data of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and confirmed that 70 companies had not shipped products to the US during the period of review, and dropped them from the review list. Twenty-one companies were also dropped from the list because the DoC was unable to locate the addresses of these companies.

After the first review in September 2007, the DoC had slashed the anti-dumping duty by 3.32 per cent to 7.22 per cent. This followed the DoC's earlier order in March, 2007, which fixed the preliminary average duty at 10.54 per cent.

Falcon Marine, Hindustan Lever Ltd (HLL) and Liberty Group were the mandatory respondents for the first review. Those companies that have not responded to the Quantity and Value (Q&V) questionnaire of the review could attract a very high Actual Facts Available (AFA) duty. In an earlier review, 15

Indian companies had attracted an AFA duty of 82.30 per cent.