Mexico Lemon Juice: ITC Votes to End AD Investigation and Suspension Agreement
The antidumping investigation on lemon juice from Mexico will be terminated, after the International Trade Commission unanimously voted June 10 that ending the case won’t injure U.S. industry. The decision also ends the 2007 agreement suspending the investigation, eliminating floors on export prices Commerce set for several Mexican companies. The agreement had brought to an end an AD duty investigation where Commerce had preliminarily found dumping by Mexican companies.
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The end of the suspension agreement will lighten the administrative burden on several Mexican companies, said Mark Lunn of Dentons, who represented Mexican exporter Procimart Citrus. Commerce had set company-specific minimum prices for Procimart and Coca Cola Mexico each year since the suspension agreement was put in place in 2007, he said. Each company had to collect and send price data to Commerce so that the agency could calculate the company-specific “normal values” upon which the minimum prices were based.
According to Commerce’s internal manual on antidumping duty cases (here), it will publish a notice terminating the Mexico suspension agreement and the underlying investigation in the Federal Register seven days after the ITC publishes this negative injury determination. The effective date will be the five-year anniversary of publication of the suspension agreement, the manual says. The suspension agreement was effective Sept. 10, 2007, but wasn’t published until Sept. 21 of that year.
The agreement suspending the antidumping duty investigation on lemon juice from Argentina will remain in place, with five of six commissioners voting that termination of the underlying investigation for Argentina would injure domestic industry.