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Seafood exporters oppose US tariffs
Seafood exporters say they will take action if the US imposes new anti-dumping tariffs on products of some Vietnamese seafood exporters.
Exporters made their views known on Tuesday at the office of the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) in HCM City after the US Department of Commerce (DOC) unofficially said the anti-dumping tariffs on Vietnamese tra fish could reach US$4.22 per kilo, equalling 130 per cent of the selling price of the Vietnamese tra fish in the US market.
Although VASEP had been informed of the news, the association's general secretary, Truong Dinh Hoe, said: "We absolutely oppose the (Preliminary) decision made by the DOC in its last review of its tariffs."
Hoe said in the last review, the DOC used the Philippines, instead of Bangladesh, as the third-country market to determine the dumping tariff margins for Vietnamese tra fish, thus causing the tariffs to rise.
Hoe said that the comparison of tra fish product prices in the Philippines and Viet Nam was inappropriate as fish feed in the latter was priced $0.5 per kilogramme compared with $2 per kilogramme for the former.
He added that production and management costs in the Philippines were also much higher than in Viet Nam.
"It's not reasonable to impose the figures collected from 36 breeding ponds with a total of 12 tonnes per year in the Philippines with the breeding farms totalling 1 million tonnes of tra fish in Viet Nam," said Hoe.
Duong Ngoc Minh, Deputy Chairman of VASEP, said the association should prove that imposing such sky-high anti-dumping tariffs on Vietnamese tra fish would not only damage Viet Nam's tra fish production but also cause losses for American customers.
If the new high tariffs are imposed in March next year, many tra fish exporters will certainly leave the American market, according to an official from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), who declined to be named.
He said the growing popularity of tra fish in the American market had resulted in the Catfish Farmers of America (CFA) lobbying against Vietnamese tra fish.
Andrew Schroth, attorney with Grunfeld, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman&Klestadt LLP (the US), who has advised Vietnamese tra fish exporters on the anti-dumping case, said VASEP should consider all available options in the Phillippines to prove that using the Philippines as a third country as the benchmark was not appropriate.
Though the final rates will not be released until six months later, related sides must work very hard to divert the decision, according to Schroth.
MARD's Deputy Minister Luong Le Phuong said the Vietnamese Government would take action to prevent the imposition of the new anti-dumping tariffs, which would affect tra fish exports to other markets around the world.
Phuong said the new tariffs could set a negative precedent by encouraging other markets such as the EU and the Middle East to follow suit.
In the previous DOC anti-dumping review, a majority of Vietnamese exporters enjoyed the lowest tariff of 0.52 per cent.
The anti-dumping tariffs imposed on Vietnamese tra fish exports to the US have affected the local industry since 2003.
Vietnamese tra fish products sell well in many markets in the world.
According to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, in the first nine months of this year, Viet Nam attained export turnover of more than $1 billion for tra fish products, and the figure is expected to exceed $1.5 billion for the entire year.
In the first quarter of this year, the American market imported 12,000 tonnes of tra fish products from Viet Nam, a 2.5-fold increase over the same period last year.
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