Two years after it began monitoring Vietnamese apparel imports, the U.S. Department of Commerce ruled Nov. 21 that there is insufficient evidence to warrant self-initiating an antidumping investigation. The ruling removed a potential disaster for the sporting goods industry which is increasingly looking to Vietnam as an alternative to China for sourcing, but sheds little light on how the government will proceed on Chinese imports once textile and apparel quotas expire at years end.
The DOC began monitoring Vietnamese imports in January 2007 at the urging of senators in the Carolinas concerned the imports would flood into the United States after Vietnam entered the World Trade Organization (WTO). Congressional Democrats and President-elect Barack Obama have since said they favor extending a similar program next year to ensure Chinese imports dont hurt U.S. textile interest after global textile and apparel quotas expire Dec. 31. The most current government data indicate Chinese textile and fabric imports rose 32.42% and 15.28% respectively in the first nine months of 2008, while apparel imports fell 2.73%.
“The China monitoring program is going to be a powerful tool for the U.S. textile industry to begin filing product-specific (Sec 337) safeguard requests and/or for the Obama Administration to self initiate antidumping cases,” said Alex Boian, director of trade policy at the Outdoor Industry Association.
In its third and final review of Vietnamese apparel imports, Commerce examined import data for five different apparel product groups from Vietnam trousers, shirts, underwear, swimwear and sweaters during the third six-month period, February through July 2008. The review determined that during this period, the United States did not import apparel from 208 of nearly 500 ten-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) lines within the five groups from Vietnam. Many of the remaining ten-digit HTS lines had rising unit values, further indicating that dumping is not taking place.
Commerce then compared trends in unit values and import levels to other suppliers of these products to the United States, including Bangladesh, CAFTA-DR (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua), Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Based on this comparison, Commerce concluded that there was insufficient evidence to self-initiate an antidumping investigation.
