The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has initiated action for the fourth administrative review (4th AR) on anti-dumping duty on frozen warm water shrimp from India, Brazil, China, Thailand and Vietnam. The department, in a notification issued on 4th of this month, has called for filing voluntary review from export houses on their exports to the US during February. '08 to January, '09.
This process is to limit the number of respondents for individual examination for the fourth edition of the review. In earlier rounds of the review DoC had listed around 350 Indian exporters for the review as per the list submitted by Southern Shrimp Alliance, the original petitioners in the anti-dumping case against
India and other countries. In order to avoid scrutinising the export details of all companies, DoC shortlisted a few companies from each country as mandatory respondents for the smooth conduct of the review. During the earlier rounds of the review, DoC selected 3-4 largest export companies from India like Devi Seafoods, Falcon Marine and Hindustan Unilever Limited.
It is also interesting to note that there are only 52 Indian seafood export houses exporting to the US on account of the heavy anti-dumping duty and customs bond imposed by Washington. The number of exporters were over 254 in 2005, but Fell sharply due to the exorbitantly high duty and bond.
In the second review, DoC dropped the average duty to 1.69 per cent from 7.5 per cent following the presentation of export details and arguments by the Indian seafood industry and the mandatory respondents. The preliminary report on the third administrative review is expected next month and a final decision will be taken in August, this year.
As termed by the exporters and experts this move is crucial and important to the domestic export industry since India's business with the US had dropped sharply during the last 4-5 years. India's export to USA had dropped to 36,612 tonne, valued at Rs 1,017 crore in 2007-08 from 43,758 tonne of Rs 1,347 crore in 2006-07.
