HCMC – Trade defense measures adopted by other countries against Vietnam’s commodities remain high barriers and local enterprises should prepare themselves for new cases, heard a seminar in HCMC on March 14.

Vietnam’s exported goods have faced a total of 73 trade defense cases since 1995, the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s Competition Authority said at the seminar.

These include 43 anti-dumping cases, 15 self-defense cases, five anti-subsidy cases, and ten tax evasion charges. This year to date, there have been two new cases, according to the seminar.

On January 30, 2014, Thailand’s Department of Foreign Trade initiated investigations into Vietnam’s non-alloy steel plates. The Indonesia Trade Safeguard Committee (KPPI) on January 23 reported to the World Trade Organization (WTO) its decision to take self-defense measures on some iron or hot-rolled steel from Vietnam.

Steel, footwear and yarn are the three products of Vietnam facing the highest number of trade defense measures. Most of enterprises suing Vietnam’s imported products are from the U.S., EU, Turkey, India and Brazil.

Statistics about trade defense of the Competition Authority show that Vietnamese goods have frequently been affected by self-defense measures taken by developing countries like Indonesia and Thailand.

Self-defense is a quick tool which does not need much effort collecting statistics like anti-dumping or anti-subsidy measures. Besides, a self-defense case does not direct at a specific business, and thus Vietnamese enterprises do not pay much care to this but suffer huge losses if self-defense measures are employed.

Vietnam is imposing self-defense measures against cooking oil imported from Malaysia, Indonesia (with a tax rate of 5% declining gradually in four years) and anti-dumping measures on cold stainless steel imported from China (6.45-6.99%), Malaysia (14.38%), Indonesia (12.03%) and Taiwan (13.23-30.73%). 

Source: SaigonTimes