As part of encouraging denationalization of industry in China and Vietnam, the U.S. government ruling includes separate duty rates for companies that “have demonstrated an absence of government control.” Many of these companies will face substantially lower or no tariffs.

The decision was prompted by a petition filed by the Shrimp Trade Action Committee. This business group includes members of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an association of companies related to the shrimp industry in eight southern coastal states. These capitalists requested that tariffs be levied on the six largest exporters of shrimp into the United States: Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Commerce Department has not yet made a decision on the other four countries.

Exporters from these countries have successfully captured a greater share of the U.S. shrimp market in the last few years. The petition cited statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau stating that import volumes from these six countries rose by about 70 percent between 2000 and 2002, while import prices declined about 28 percent.The U.S. shrimp fishing companies claim this has caused a decline in the domestic price by 45 percent. At the same time, consumer prices for shrimp have risen during the same period, which has meant higher profits for U.S. distributors.

Vietnam’s seafood industry condemned the accusations last February when the U.S. international trade commission first ruled that Hanoi and other governments were “dumping” shrimp into the United States. Fish farming is the second largest export industry in Vietnam. The United States accounts for almost half of Vietnam’s shrimp export market. Last year, Washington imposed tariffs on imports of catfish from Vietnam.

Beijing has been a major target of “antidumping” tariffs by the U.S. government, which imposed similar duties on a number of products manufactured in China this year. At the same time, Washington continues to negotiate trade deals with Beijing as it seeks to take maximum share of the Chinese market to sell U.S.-made goods.

Meanwhile, the governments in most countries in the European Union, Japan, and the United States continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on agricultural subsidies for capitalist farmers, allowing them to often sell farm products below the cost of production to drive out of business producers in the semicolonial world.

Through these unequal terms of trade, imposed through the imperialist domination of finance capital, Washington increased its agricultural export/import ratio with semicolonial countries by 198 percent between 1997 and 2002, according to the International Food Policy Institute, a group funded by the World Bank. The same group estimates that these subsidies cost semicolonial countries about $24 billion a year in lost exports.

As a result, millions of farmers in the oppressed nations lose money on crops grown for the domestic market and are driven out of business and off the land. Through this process, Washington and its imperialist allies strengthen their domination of the Third World and accelerate the long-term social crisis in these countries.  
 
 
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