CIT Upholds Use of Indian Surrogate Data Over Indonesian in Fish Fillet Review
After two remands, the Court of International Trade sustained March 10 the Commerce Department’s choice of India as a surrogate over Indonesia for an antidumping duty review on Vietnamese-origin frozen fish fillets. The department’s selection was reasonable and adequately explained, it said.
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CIT Judge M. Miller Baker previously remanded the review results to Commerce for its refusal to find that Indonesia and India were both at comparable levels of economic development to Vietnam. After the department “grudgingly conceded” the point and “disclaimed ‘affording [any] preference to India,’” which “leveled the playing field for the first time,” Commerce reasonably determined that the Indian cost data for fish fillet inputs was still superior, the court said.
India’s whole live fish data, for instance, was species-specific, whereas Indonesia’s wasn’t, it noted. Although petitioner Catfish Farmers of America argued that the data was unrepresentative because it was based on a study that only looked at two districts -- plus 254 other villages outside those districts -- “Commerce reasonably explained” that those districts produced the greatest proportion of live fish in India and the study was comprehensive and transparent, it said.
Further, the department “observed that the Indonesian figures Catfish Farmers submitted do not contain the level of specificity on which the group is insisting,” the court said.
The court’s fingerling analysis was similar. And Baker finally upheld the department’s decision to go with Indian over Indonesian labor costs -- a category in which the Indian data was less current than the Indonesian. The department had called the Indian data “useable” and applied an inflator, he noted.
“To break the tie, Commerce had to choose between two regulatory preferences -- one favoring contemporaneous data, the other data from a single country where possible,” it said.
It said the department chose the latter. This “weighing of preferences is the agency’s prerogative,” it said.
(Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, Slip Op. 25-24, CIT # 20-00105, dated 03/10/25; Judge: M. Miller Baker; Attorneys: Nazak Nikakhtar of Wiley Rein for plaintiff Catfish Farmers of America; Brian Boynton for defendant U.S. government)