Ecuadorian Exporters’ Effort to Win Exemption from Trade Relief Blocked

The Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) approves the U.S. government’s efforts blocking Ecuadorian exporters’ efforts to seek exemption from U.S. trade relief.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (Commerce) announced the final results of the expedited review of the countervailing duty order on frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador. The decision rejects a more than year-long effort of three Ecuadorian exporters to be excluded from the countervailing duty order on Ecuadorian shrimp.

What Is an Expedited Review?

An “expedited review” is an administrative process Commerce created that isn’t provided for by statute. It allows exporting companies that were not specifically and individually investigated in the initial investigation to seek permanent exclusion from trade relief, provided they can show that they did not receive countervailable subsidies during the period of investigation.

In practice, this means that after having spent nearly one year conducting an investigation of the countervailable subsidies granted to an industry, Commerce will re-do that investigation for any company that requests an “expedited review.”

In this case, three Ecuadorian shrimp exporters – Empacadora del Pacifico S.A. (Edpacif), Nirsa S.A. /Procesadora Posorja S.A. (Nirsa/Proposorja), and Productos Perecibles y Mariscos S.A. (Propemar) – requested an expedited review in February 2025. As a result, Commerce spent the last eighteen months investigating whether the three companies received countervailable subsidies from the government of Ecuador during the 2022 calendar year.

Historically, foreign exporters have used the “expedited review” administrative process as a low-risk opportunity to carve out holes in a countervailing duty order. After a lengthy and expensive initial investigation, these “expedited reviews” require domestic industries to commit additional resources to another year of administrative litigation in order to maintain the integrity of trade relief. If a domestic industry cannot devote resources to further litigation, an “expedited review” becomes a check-the-box exercise in which foreign exporter claims receive little further investigation.

Why Didn’t the Expedited Review Work for Foreign Exporters this Time?

In response to the three exporters’ request, the Southern Shrimp Alliance, through the Ad Hoc Shrimp Trade Action Committee (AHSTAC), and the American Shrimp Processors Association (ASPA) committed significant resources to defending the countervailing duty order.

Over the last quarter century, the Ecuadorian shrimp industry has been investigated by Commerce for unfair trade practices three times: for dumping in 2004, for countervailable subsidies in 2013, and, again, for countervailable subsidies in 2024. Each time, Commerce found the Ecuadorian shrimp exporters were engaging in unfair trade.

Yet those findings didn’t always lead to lasting relief. The February 2005 antidumping duty order was revoked in August 2007 over the objection of American shrimpers. And in 2013, the U.S. International Trade Commission—over the dissent of two commissioners–found that the domestic shrimp processing industry had not suffered material injury from the unfairly-traded imports, so no countervailing duty order was issued.

Faced with the prospect of Ecuadorian shrimp once again evading consequences for unfair trading practices, ASPA and the Southern Shrimp Alliance fully participated in the “expedited review” before Commerce and challenged Edpacif’s, Nirsa/Proposorja’s, and Propemar’s claims to have not benefitted from countervailable subsidies.

About the Southern Shrimp Alliance

The Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) is an organization of shrimp fishermen, shrimp processors, and other members of the domestic industry in the eight warmwater shrimp producing states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.

Read more here.