Commerce Sticks With India as Surrogate on Remand in Fish Fillets From Vietnam AD Investigation

The Commerce Department continued to find that India was the appropriate primary surrogate country in its 16th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam, it said in remand results filed Nov. 6 at the Court of International Trade (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 21-00380)

In his July remand order, Judge M. Miller Baker said that the department "misapplied the statutory standard" for picking surrogate countries. Commerce gave "no indication as to what criteria it employs" to find what constitutes either "the same" or "a comparable" level of economic development, he said (see 2307170051).

In response, and in accordance with the court’s order, Commerce said it reconsidered the relative merits of the Indonesian data, but continued to find that Indonesian economic development outpaced that of Vietnam and made the country a poor comparison. The surrogate criteria demonstrated that India offers "the best information on the record" for surrogate values, Commerce said. Even if the Indonesian data was equivalent, it would not change the department's results because it has discretion to choose between potential surrogate countries, it said.

Commerce said it uses a variety of sources to choose countries that "reasonably represent" the market values that would be present in the non-market economy country and that its approach has been sustained in prior cases. The petitioners have essentially asked the department to "reweigh the evidence" to favor certain surrogate value selection criteria over others in order to force the department to use Indonesian data more favorable to them, Commerce said.

The department did further explain its surrogate country selection process as a hierarchy of preferences beginning with countries at the same level of economic development as the country in question, then looking at countries that are significant producers of comparable merchandise, followed by whether those countries had usable data. Only then, Commerce said, does it consider countries outside of "the same" level of economic development.

In this case, Commerce said it began with the annual World Bank Development Report, which showed India was much more closely related to Vietnam than Indonesia in terms of development for the period of investigation, based on per capita GNI. Commerce also found that India was a significant producer of comparable merchandise and that the record contained usable data for India.

Commerce said because of the initial matching, the department was not presented with a scenario where none of the countries on its list matched enough to require the selection of a country at a different level of economic development, such as Indonesia.