Commerce Legally Used Honey Acquisition Costs as Proxy to Calculate COP, AD Respondents Argue
The Commerce Department legally relied on respondents Allied Natural Product's and Ambrosia Natural Products (India)'s raw honey acquisition costs as a proxy to calculate cost of production in the antidumping duty investigation into raw honey from India, the respondents argued in a reply brief at the Court of International Trade. Issuing the brief as a supplement to the government's claims, Allied and Ambrosia added that, contrary to petitioner American Honey Producers Association's claims, Commerce did not use the beekepeers' and "middlemen" suppliers' costs as "benchmarks" for setting the cost of honey (American Honey Producers Association v. U.S., CIT # 22-00195).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Instead of using the actual beekeeper and middlemen supplier costs as a benchmark, Commerce "compared the beekeepers’ and middlemen suppliers’ actual costs to the actual prices that the same middlemen suppliers charged to Allied and Ambrosia to determine whether the beekeepers and middlemen were selling above their actual costs of production for the raw honey, and thus whether Allied’s and Ambrosia’s acquisition costs were not missing costs and were reliable for purposes of calculating COP," the brief said.
Understanding this methodology is important since it shows that even though Commerce's sampling of certain beekeeper costs did not result in "representative costs of production for all the raw honey that Allied and Ambrosia purchase," the agency still could use the actual cost data to test whether the prices paid to the same suppliers were reliable for calculating COP, the brief said. "By focusing on the largest honey suppliers to Allied and Ambrosia, and then selecting from among those suppliers the beekeepers with the lowest sale prices, Commerce adopted a price comparison methodology that was both reasonable and logical."
The American Honey Producers Association and Sioux Honey Association said higher-priced sales are just as likely to be sold below cost as low-priced sales, and that "higher-priced sales are more likely to come from more sophisticated operations with higher costs." Allied and Ambrosia said the petitioners didn't support this claim, but the "main problem with their argument is that their 'more likely/just as likely' arguments reveal that they simply disagree with Commerce’s weighing of the evidence."