By Nathaniel Maandig Rickard of Picard, Kentz & Rowe, LLC
On June 1, 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) released the agency’s annual Trade and Travel Report for fiscal year (“FY”) 2022. The report was published more than eight months after the September 30th close of the fiscal year, meaning that the Report was delayed considerably compared to reports issued for earlier fiscal years. In its Report, CBP notes that the number of antidumping (“AD”) and countervailing duty (“CVD”) orders enforced by the agency continues to grow and that CBP was enforcing 662 AD/CVD orders at the end of FY2022, more than double the number of orders enforced by the agency at the end of FY2016.
In FY2022, CBP reported that the agency had collected approximately $3.6 billion in AD/CVD deposits on imports worth $37.4 billion (“Type 3 imports”). As shown in the chart below, both the amount of AD/CVDs deposited and the value of imports subject to these trade remedies is unprecedented and reflects substantial growth in the use of these laws over the last eight years.
The total value of imports subject to AD/CVDs increased by 24 percent ($7 billion) over the total in FY2021, while the amount of AD/CVDs deposited with CBP increased by 50 percent ($1.2 billion) over the previous fiscal year.
Although the overall value of imports subject to AD/CVD orders reached a record level last year, the data released by CBP once again confirms that these trade remedies do not cause meaningful disruptions in the U.S market. For the $37.4 billion in goods imported during the last fiscal year that were subject to AD and/or CVD orders, just $3.6 billion in AD/CVDs was deposited with CBP, an amount equal to an average duty on these imports of 9.6 percent. As shown in the chart below, the effective AD/CVD deposit rate applied to the subset of imports subject to these trade remedies (Type 3 imports) has been less than ten percent for each of the last three fiscal years.
Moreover, CBP’s Report contextualizes the substantial increase in the coverage of AD/CVD orders as taking place simultaneous with a massive increase of imports into the United States. For FY2022, CBP reports that the agency processed $3.35 trillion in imports, an increase of roughly twenty percent from the previous year. As shown in the chart below, the amount of imports presented to CBP last year was well beyond the agency’s historical experience.
Accordingly, even with a growing number of AD/CVD orders in effect, just 1.1 percent of the total overall import value was subject to these trade remedies in FY2022.
Once again, the new data released by CBP confirm that AD/CVDs have become increasingly important to a broadening range of U.S. industries found to be injured by unfair trade. Nevertheless, at the same time, because the trade remedy laws are narrowly-tailored, the use of these laws has caused minimal disruptions to overall trade and has not discouraged imports of goods into the country in any meaningful respect.