The Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) has voiced its protest against the anti-dumping tax rates on imported Vietnamese Tra (pangasius) fish imposed by the preliminary decision of the United States.

The VASEP also expressed its objection to US Department of Commerce (DOC)'s decision to use a different surrogate country to calculate the cost of Vietnamese fish products in the ninth administrative reviews (POR9).

The unfair decision of selecting Indonesia as the primary surrogate country for its calculations of Vietnamese pangasius inputs led to unreasonably high levels of the antidumping duty on fish exporters, said the association on Friday.

The association asked the DOC to keep Bangladesh as the proxy country for calculating the input costs of Vietnamese Tra fish products in the final decision of the POR 8 and 9 as in previous years since the producers in the two countries have the same production cost and revenue.

On Sept. 4, the US DOC issued the preliminary results of the ninth antidumping duty administrative reviews (POR 9) on certain frozen pangasius fillets imported from Vietnam between August 1, 2011 and July 31, 2012.

In its preliminary decision, DOC imposed an antidumping duty of 0.42 US dollars per kilogram and 2.15 US dollars per kilogram to two mandatory respondents. Other separate rate respondents have to pay 0.99 US dollars per kilogram.

Earlier, VASEP and Vietnamese pangasius companies subjected to the higher antidumping duty filed a lawsuit against the DOC's final decision of POR 8 to US Court of International Trade (US CIT), asking to reconsider the accuracy of DOC's calculations and requiring DOC to select a comparable surrogate country to recalculate the tax.

The DOC's previous decision in 2012, which announced list of 6 countries selected to be surrogate one in calculating the antidumping tax in the POR 9, excluded Indonesia as it is not " economically comparable" to Vietnam for more than half of the POR's criteria.

According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, in the first seven months of 2013, Vietnam earned 985 million US dollars from Tra fish exports, a year-on-year decrease of 0.6 percent.

Vietnam Tra fish is exported to 142 countries and regions, of which the European Union is the largest market, followed by the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN).

The country expects to pocket a total value of 1.7-1.8 billion US dollars from Tra fish exports in 2013, said the ministry.