March 8, 2010

Indian shrimp traders' customs bond still pending with US

Even as the value of Indian shrimp exports to the US has fallen by close to 70% to US$140 million, there is an outstanding amount of US$50 million due to the Indian exporters which they had paid as customs bonds.

With anti-dumping duty reigning at 10.17% levels, Indian shrimp exporters were obliged to execute custom bonds to the tune of US$20 million in 2005-06.

In the following year, the Indian exporters had to execute bonds worth around US$11.55 million. These were to be repaid to the Indian exporters if the levels of duty were reduced in the Annual Administrative Reviews in the following years.

Although successive Administrative Reviews had found lesser incidence of dumping and reduced the anti-dumping duties to 0.79%, the Customs bonds were neither liquidated nor redeemed, Seafood Exporters Association of India sources pointed out.

In addition, although the level of customs bonds to be executed had fallen sharply in the subsequent years, the total corpus just continued to grow. Now the industry points out that corpus of the customs bonds that is to be liquidated and redeemed is over one-third of the total value of shrimp exports to the US.