Author: Kara M. Reynolds and Yan Su, American University  
 
As multilateral trade agreements have lowered tariffs and quantitative trade restrictions across the world, the use of other regulatory tools has increased to fill the protection void. One of these ``new'' forms of protection, antidumping regulation, has the potential to become one of the most significant barriers to world trade. Antidumping regulations allow industries to request that tariffs be imposed upon specific products from specific countries because these products are allegedly being sold at unfairly low prices and causing irreparable harm to the domestic industry. Once the domain of a handful of industrialized countries, since the inclusion of the Antidumping Agreement in the last WTO trade agreement the amount of antidumping trade protection across the world has skyrocketed. Forty-one WTO members filed 2,437 antidumping cases between 1995 and 2003, an almost 40 percent increase over the nine years prior to this period. The United States alone filed 330 antidumping petitions against other countries and was subjected to 139 antidumping cases filed by 20 different countries during the period.
 
Although the traditional, industrialized users of antidumping primarily use the regulations to protect domestic manufacturing industries, new, developing users file more antidumping cases against agricultural products. Agriculture accounted for 6 percent of AD investigations between 1987 and 1997, but over 10 percent of total investigations among new users such as Brazil and Colombia. Depending on the outcome, even one antidumping case can dramatically limit exports of agricultural products. For example, in 2000 Mexico filed an antidumping case that eventually led to the imposition of a 10.18 percent antidumping tariff on all U.S. exports of rice. The quantity of U.S. exports of rice to Mexico fell nearly 10 percent between 2000 and 2001 alone. Over the past 10 years, producers in the United States have seen exports plummet due to the imposition of antidumping duties as high as 50 percent on exports of such things as apples, beef, chicken, pork, tomatoes, corn, rice, fructose and refined sugar. However, other growers have benefited from the protection afforded to them by U.S. antidumping regulations. U.S. producers have successfully requested antidumping protection from imports of a wide variety of food products, including wheat, raspberries, honey, apple juice, and mushrooms.
 
Many economists and industry analysts argue that current antidumping regulations result in the imposition of more antidumping protection on agricultural products than others because of the unique characteristics of the industry. For example, because the supply of perishable products cannot be adjusted to price variation in the short-run, selling below the sunk cost of production is completely rational. Moreover, food and fiber products, particularly perishable products, experience more frequent price variations than manufactured goods. Therefore, it is likely that government investigators will determine that products are being sold at unfairly low prices more often in agriculture than manufacturing sectors. Others argue that in addition to this agriculture bias in global antidumping regulations, there may be a bias in the implementation of antidumping regulations against U.S. producers. Specifically, U.S. government officials have stated that developing countries tend to impose higher dumping margins than the United States due to questionable legal practices. Therefore, U.S. agricultural producers may be especially hard hit by global antidumping protection if both forms of bias exist in global antidumping regulations.
 
Given the increasing use of antidumping protection in the agriculture sector, and the dramatic impact these regulations have on world trade of food products, it is important to understand to what degree antidumping regulations are biased toward imposing higher levels of protection against agricultural products compared to other goods and whether there is an even larger bias toward imposing antidumping protection on U.S. produced food products. In an effort to address these issues, this research presents case studies of 36 antidumping investigations involving U.S. agricultural producers between 1995 and 2003. Each chapter includes a brief description of the U.S. and foreign industries involved in the antidumping investigation, a discussion of the investigation itself including specific aspects of the final government determination, and the final outcome of the case including the impact of the investigation on trade patterns. The results reveal a number of surprising similarities in the outcomes of these investigations that should be noted both by agricultural producers considering requesting antidumping protection and government officials charged with setting and implementing antidumping regulations.