US, Frozen Fish Petitioner Respond to Remand Results in Ongoing Surrogate Selection Conflict
The U.S. and petitioner Catfish Farmers of America each filed responses to remands in two cases dealing, respectively, with the 2018-19 and 2019-20 administrative reviews of the antidumping duty orders on frozen fish fillets from Vietnam (Catfish Farmers of America v. United States, CIT # 21-00380; 22-00125).
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In both reviews, the Commerce Department refused to return to using Indonesia as a surrogate after years of doing so, despite opposition by Catfish Farmers. In remand results released Oct. 18 and Dec. 12, 2024 (see 2410220042), the department provided further analysis for its decision to use India as a surrogate instead.
The department looked to two Indian publications, Fishing Chimes and Undercurrent News, to value the review mandatory respondents’ main factors of production: whole live fish, fingerlings and fish feed. Catfish Farmers argues that Fishing Chimes, which covers 46 of 300 villages that produce whole live fish, doesn’t represent a “broad market average.” And it says that Undercurrent News isn’t transparent enough in its methodology.
The U.S. defended the department's remand results for the 2018-19 review. It said that the Indian data sources Commerce used were adequate. Fishing Chimes, it said, wasn’t a “one-off, private study,” but an almost 40-year-old publication and “similar to other publications relied upon by Commerce in other proceedings.” It also offered the department plenty of data -- 108 data points.
“CFA’s mere disagreement with Commerce’s findings that 108 data points constitute a ‘large’ number representing nearly 60 percent of India’s entire pangasius production which constitutes a broad market average (therefore satisfying all SV selection criteria), does not undermine Commerce’s reliance on Indian SV sources, especially when considering Commerce’s concerns about the Indonesian data sources,” it said.
It also said the petitioner “seeks to undermine the credibility of” Undercurrent News by claiming the publication’s broad scope and “decades old history” were irrelevant. Catfish Farmers was attacking the “vague” methodology of the publication despite the fact that its own preferred Indonesian sources were even more suspect, it said.
“Here, too, CFA is [unfazed] by the vague and ambiguous description of their sources while, at the same time, CFA finds the description of the underlying sources in Fishing Chimes and Undercurrent News to be inadequate,” it said.
In turn, Catfish Farmers said in regard to the 2019-20 review that the U.S. still was not adequately supporting its surrogate decision.
It called Commerce’s determination that Fishing Chimes’ data was broadly representative “wrong as a matter of logic and basic math.”
“Commerce ignores that ‘large’ is a relative term,” it said. “Based on the scant information contained in the reports, it is clear that they do not include ‘data points’ from 85 percent of villages in the ‘two large-scale pangasius producing districts’ of Andhra Pradesh.”
And Undercurrent News “exhibits indicia of unreliability” by refusing to explain, for example, its methodology to “independent market researchers” such as Mississippi State University professor Ganesh Kumar Kanrunakaran. The professor described the data as “easily manipulatable” and “not scientifically validated,” it said.