Ohio Senators Introduce Bill to Change AD/CVD Law
The bipartisan Ohio delegation -- Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Sen. Rob Portman (R) -- have introduced a bill that aims to improve the administration of antidumping and countervailing duty laws.
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For calculating whether a good is dumped, the bill specifies that low quantities of product sold at unusually high prices should not be used in the normal value assessment. Portman's summary said, “this section will prevent exporters from further cheating by making unrepresentative sales in small quantities to boost the normal value and reduce the likelihood their products will be found to be dumped.”
The legislation, introduced April 15, would provide for expedited “successive investigations” when a product subject to a trade remedy order sees an import surge from a new country after the penalty is imposed. It instructs the International Trade Commission to look at the relationship between the new investigation and the concurrent or recently concluded investigation on the same product.
It also would address extraterritorial subsidies. “For example, in a CVD investigation into Indonesian exports by a Chinese company with facilities in Indonesia, existing law would only capture subsidization of that company by the Indonesian government, while failing to address subsidies provided to that same company by the Chinese government, for example through China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” a summary from Portman's office said.
It would require the Commerce Department to begin or reject anti-circumvention inquiries within 20 days of a complaint, and asks that a preliminary determination be achieved within 90 days of beginning the investigation, and a final determination within 120 days. However, each of those steps could be extended under the statute's deadlines, up to 180 days for the final determination.
Ohio is a big steel state, one of the industries that most aggressively uses AD/CVD, and the American Iron and Steel Institute is urging passage of the bill, which is called “Eliminating Global Market Distortions to Protect American Jobs Act of 2021.”
AISI CEO Kevin Dempsey said, “The American steel industry is the backbone of the economy but has faced repeated surges of unfairly traded steel in recent years. Domestic steelmakers have successfully sought relief under the U.S. trade remedy system, only to face new surges of steel imports of the same products from other countries not subject to the original anti dumping or countervailing duty orders. This bill will help address the ‘whack-a-mole’ problem, when new imports immediately replace the old ones, by creating successive investigations and allowing for quicker relief than under the current system. The bill also tackles subsidization across borders, such as when Chinese steelmakers -- subsidized through China’s Belt and Road Initiative -- build new export-oriented steelmaking facilities in other Asian countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam and others.”