Countervailing Subsidy for Moroccan Phosphate Fertilizer Too Low, Petitioner Says

Commerce’s countervailing duty for a Moroccan phosphate fertilizer exporter was too low because it either ignored or underestimated several benefits, a domestic petitioner said Dec 28 in the Court of International Trade (The Mosaic Company v. U.S., CIT # 23-00246).

In the Commerce Department’s 2020-2021 administrative review on phosphate fertilizers from Morocco, the agency determined that several of the six Moroccan government programs Mosaic brought to its attention did provide countervailable subsidies to OCP, a Moroccan exporter, Mosaic said. To calculate the benefit OCP received from the programs, Commerce had to derive a world market benchmark for its products, the petitioner said; the agency did so by including prices for Egyptian, Chinese and Syrian phosphate rock, among others, and by limiting its comparison pool to companies whose products’ bone phosphate of lime content was comparable to OCP’s.

Mosaic argued Commerce erred in calculating benefits OCP received from one program, which provided phosphate mining rights for less-than-adequate remuneration. It should not have ignored certain price data, and it should have excluded Egyptian, Chinese and Syrian prices from its world market benchmark price calculation on the basis of evidence Mosaic provided it during its review, the petitioner said.

“Commerce did not discuss the evidence in Mosaic’s case brief that the Chinese government has directly intervened in the export market by imposing export taxes or export bans,” it said. “Nor did Commerce address record evidence discussing how sanctions had forced Syria to “sell {phosphate rock} at a political discount.”

Likewise, it challenged Commerce’s determinations that three other Moroccan programs – one that it said provided port services for the company, another that it said supplied OCP infrastructure for less-than-adequate remuneration and a third that it claimed granted OCP mining rights for LTAR -- were not countervailable subsidies.

Mosaic also contested Commerce’s decision to allow what OCP characterized as support and debt costs to be included in its calculation of OCP’s phosphate rock cost build-up.