Commerce Used Bad Surrogate Data in AD Review of Vietnamese Fish Fillets, Trade Group Says

The department's selection of India as its surrogate was flawed, the trade group said, because India's fish fillet market data is incomplete, vague and unreliable.

Catfish Farmers brought its case arguing Indonesia was a better surrogate for the review than India, Commerce’s ultimate selection (see 2303130058). Initially, it claimed the department had failed to properly consider Indonesia as a surrogate option even though the country met all statutory requirements for the role.

In its remand results, Commerce defended its decision in its final results to not consider Indonesia, saying courts have upheld the department’s preference for surrogates at the “same” rather than “comparable” level of development as the country under review -- and it found Indonesia to only be comparable to Vietnam during the review. But, on remand, Commerce regardless conducted a comparative analysis of Indonesia and India and again found the latter to be the better surrogate. India, it said, provided much more reliable financial data, and the country’s gross national income was closer to Vietnam’s than Indonesia’s was.

Replying to the remand results, Catfish Farmers disagreed that the Indian financial data was more reliable.

It said that fish fillets require three primary inputs: whole fish, fingerlings and feed. “The relative quality” of the data for all three “has been a key issue in this litigation,” it said.

But Commerce used Indian data for these inputs derived from two primary sources, both of which are flawed and both of which “this Court has repeatedly questioned,” it claimed. The first was fish fillet value figures from a study that encompasses only two districts of India, even though no evidence shows these two districts “produced far more fish than anywhere else,” it said. The second, it said, was a pricing portal containing “vague” data that is run by the publication Undercurrent News.

First, Commerce apparently conflated the two into a single source in its review, the trade group said, which “itself provides ground for remand.”

“Such conflation of distinct data sources indicates that the agency has substantially misread and misunderstood the record,” it said.

Second, it said, both data sources provided only “geographically and temporally limited and incomplete information.” The study, for example, is not only limited to two districts, but also only surveys about 15% of the farmers of subject merchandise in those districts, it said -- it called it “impossible” to evaluate whether that data was suitably representative of the overall market.

And Undercurrent News’ data suffered from similar deficiencies, the trade group said. It said the data portal provided no details as to how its information was actually collected, “such as the number of interviews conducted, the timing of interviews, which regions were considered major, or the volume of overall [fish fillet] production represented by the farmers interviewed.”

The department also departed from past practice by using the district-specific data because it has regularly preferred country-wide data, Catfish Farmers argued.

The trade group also claimed that Indonesia offered more accurate data on the subject merchandise.

And it said Commerce hadn’t adequately justified its use of Indian surrogate data for labor, byproducts and financial resources, either. For example, the department used Indian labor data from 2011-12 in the review, even though the court has criticized such use of “outdated” data in the past. On the contrary, the Indonesian labor data offered by the trade group is contemporary, it said.