EBB confirms that the EU commission disclosed a proposal for definitive antidumping duties against unfair biodiesel imports from Indonesia and Argentina. The disclosure, which includes a duty proposal, has to be considered as an important move of the EU commission to tackle highly distortive trade practices including differential export taxes (DETs) regimes applied by these two countries.

The EU industry has suffered for years from the growing injury caused in the EU market by the unacceptable, negative impact of such unfair trade practices. Since 2010, Argentina and Indonesia account for more than 90 percent of European biodiesel imports.

The situation is worsening every week: in fact, provisional antidumping duties imposed last May were well below the level needed to stop unfair imports and market sources report that [significant] quantities of Argentine and Indonesian biodiesel have been shipped to the EU during the summer.

The newly proposed levels for definitive antidumping duties are between €215 and €250 ($292 and $340) per ton for biodiesel imported from Argentina, and between €120 and €180 ($163 to $245) per ton for biodiesel imported from Indonesia.  

EBB considers that such duty levels should still be higher in order to cover the full dumping margin identified by the commission for exporters from the two countries. Our industry strongly believes that in cases where trade distortions are so egregious and where raw material distortion are involved, the commission, as it has proposed in its recent communication on the modernization of trade instruments, should abandon the so called “lesser duty rule.” The EU is today the only WTO member to apply systematically this rule according to which duties can be set at a lower level than the dumping margin in case a lower duty is considered sufficient to eliminate injury.

In practical terms, this would generate the necessary increase in the proposed import duty up to a level where present unfair practices would be fully corrected.

In this case, definitive duties will have to be decided upon by the end of November “by accomplishing a further final move to definitive duties including the full dumping margin of Indonesian and Argentinean biodiesel producers, European institutions have the opportunity in the next weeks to send a strong signal against unfair biodiesel trade and the very strong distortive effects of DETs in international trade,” insisted Raffaello Garofalo, EBB secretary general.