US Shrimp Producers Support ITC Injury Finding Regarding Frozen Warmwater Shrimp

The producers, Ad Hoc Shrimp Trade Action Committee and the American Shrimp Processors Association, each said the commission had been right to find that imports, not supply constraints, resulted in U.S. shrimp fishermen’s production decreases during the investigation period. They both said they wouldn’t rehash ITC’s own support of its finding (see 2511260070).

Ad Hoc argued that the ITC had been right to count both frozen raw shrimp and frozen cooked shrimp in its definition of domestic like product. It said all six comparison factors support that decision.

For example, “information submitted by ASPA demonstrated that when consumers browse frozen raw shrimp on websites for grocery-delivery services, the first ‘similar item’ shown is frozen cooked shrimp,” it said. And an expert witness for the Indian exporters even stated that, like raw shrimp, cooked shrimp is sold for use in dishes such as “shrimp cocktail, or as part of a seafood platter, or perhaps even as an entrée add-on” -- despite exporters’ claim that cooked shrimp isn’t sold to restaurants or other food services.

It also challenged the economic report exporters offered to support their argument that supply constraints, not imports, had been the cause of damage to the domestic industry. The report was based on incomplete data, it said, and employed a “limited regression methodology.”

Particularly, it said, the report conducted one regression showing no relationship between ex-vessel prices and domestic landings and another showing no relationship between diesel prices and domestic landings, it said. But diesel prices “may impact both domestic landings and ex-vessel prices, rendering a simple regression of the latter two variables without controlling for the first variable misleading and incomplete,” it said.

The report also failed to properly utilize data from before “the flooding of the U.S. market by farmed shrimp imports,” it claimed. For example, in 1983, the domestic industry accounted for 141.5 million pounds of shrimp landings, it said.

A prior 2005 ITC determination that canned warmwater shrimp wasn’t the same thing as frozen warmwater shrimp was “readily distinguishable on the facts,” it said, as canned shrimp is smaller and doesn’t undergo the freezing process.

In turn, American Shrimp Processors said the ITC’s finding that imports had undersold domestic like product was based on more than just a market share shift during the investigation period. The commission considered quarterly quantity and sales data, it said, and analyzed it to determine that imports undersold U.S. shrimp in 65.9% of quarterly comparison.

Half of surveyed shrimp purchasers also said that they purchased imports instead of domestic product due to price, it noted.

And exporters’ claim that the U.S. shrimp industry lost only 0.3% of its market share was based only on data from U.S. frozen shrimp processors, ignoring U.S. fresh shrimp harvesters, it said. But the domestic shrimp industry “as a whole” includes both, it said.

Exporters were wrong, too, that the ITC’s definition of “significant underselling” was subject to judicial analysis under Loper Bright, it argued. The ITC’s underselling analysis “is fact specific,” it said, and Loper Bright doesn’t apply to factual findings by agencies.

U.S. processors’ increased capital expenditures during the review period, meanwhile, weren’t evidence that the shrimp imports weren’t hurting the domestic industry, it said. Many processors actually had to “cancel, postpone, or scale back investment projects” due to competition with low-priced imports, it said.

Finally, the ITC was right to find that competition wasn’t attenuated between farm-raised and wild-caught shrimp, it argued. Although a majority of importers and purchasers said the products weren’t interchangeable, other evidence, such as lost sales and revenue data, showed that they were, it said.