CIT Gives Commerce Third Chance on Wage Rates in Vietnam Shrimp AD Review
The Court of International Trade again sent back down the 2009-10 antidumping duty administrative review on frozen warmwater shrimp from Vietnam due to concerns over the wage rate Commerce selected to value labor involved in Camau’s production process. The review has already been remanded twice (see 12111602 and 13080201), with Commerce refusing to budge from its use of Bangladeshi wage rates to determine the wages Camau would have paid its workers if it was in a market economy country.
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Each time it remanded, the court told Commerce that it failed to address the concern that Bangladesh is a much poorer country than Vietnam, and that consequently the use of wage rates from Bangladesh distorted Camau’s AD duty rate. Commerce had used the Bangladesh rate because the agency had used Bangladeshi prices to value all of the other inputs Camau used to produce shrimp.
This time, Commerce said CIT left it no choice, and under protest calculated a wage rate from an average of several countries’ wages. But CIT refused to sustain the new rate, taking issue with the agency’s claim that it had compelled use of a specific method. The problem with using Bangladesh’s rate wasn’t that it had used a single country to value all inputs, but rather that Commerce had failed to address issues related to Bangladesh’s relative level of development. For example, the agency didn’t get into whether the accuracy gained by using Bangladeshi data to value other inputs outweighed the accuracy lost by using Bangladeshi data to value labor. The court said it couldn’t accept Commerce’s redetermination because the new results “are not grounded in an analysis of the factual record but are the apparent result of a mistaken belief in a compulsion to reach such results.”
(Camau Frozen Seafood Processing Imp. Exp. Corp. v. U.S., Slip Op. 14-28, dated 03/10/14, Judge Pogue)