Commerce Sticks With India as Main Surrogate in AD Review on Vietnamese Fish Fillets

The Commerce Department stuck by its decision to use India as its primary surrogate country on remand at the Court of International Trade in a case on the 2017-18 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam (Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, CIT Consol. # 20-00105).

The trade court sent back the review in February, rejecting the agency's claim that it was unnecessary to address whether Indonesia is economically comparable to Vietnam after picking India as the main surrogate country (see 2402270033). On remand, Commerce said it disagrees that the language of the statute, 19 U.S.C. 773(c)(4), requires Commerce to consider all countries that broadly meet the definition of "comparable" on an equal basis.

Nevertheless, the agency "considered the relative merits of the Indian and Indonesian data, while affording no preference to India, despite its inclusion on the Surrogate Country List." In its remand, Commerce said it provided a more "extensive comparison" of the surrogate value data from the two countries, particularly on "whole live fish, fingerlings, fish feed, by-products, and the surrogate financial ratios."

The trade court told Commerce to explain its use of data from the Indian publication Fishing Chimes in finding that the Indian data represents a broad market average. The court noted that the AD petitioners cited evidence showing that 80% of pangasius production in India solely came from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh but that Commerce errantly tried to claim that the data pulled from all over India. On remand, the agency said it doesn't disagree that the data wasn't sourced from all of the villages that were covered by the study throughout India, but it said it doesn't find that this fact "renders the data unrepresentative or otherwise unusable."

Commerce added that, with regard to fingerlings, the Fishing Chimes data is superior to the Indonesian data. While both are contemporaneous with the review period and publicly available, "the survey data for Fishing Chimes were based on responses from numerous farmers and were corroborated by field visits and comparisons to other data sources," Commerce said. "The downsides of the corresponding Indonesian source (i.e., data from the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries) are that they are less specific with respect to size and the particular species."

The agency said there were two areas where the Indonesian data was preferable: the Indian data used labor inputs that weren't contemporaneous with the review period and the Indonesian data gave a better option for certain by-products. Regarding the labor data, Commerce said there's nothing suggesting the Indian values are "anomalous" and that it prefers to use data from one country. On the by-product data, the agency said it relied on Indonesian data for certain by-products.

The trade court also sent back Commerce's analysis of NTSF Seafoods Joint Stock Company's reporting on the consumption rate for whole live fish -- a main input of the fish fillets. On remand, the agency said NTSF's data is "reliable" and is "corroborated by information in several verification reports from prior administrative reviews wherein Commerce conducted yield tests."