A recent article that appeared in the April 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal discussed an ongoing battle over imported shrimp into the US market. The article details the ongoing plight of a former US shrimper- John Williams- who started an organization called Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) after growing concern that foreign shrimp producers were dumping shrimp in the US at unfairly low prices. Dumping is a practice where a firm or manufacturer sells the same good to a foreign country at a lower price, often a price below production cost, than that charged to the domestic buyer.
Dumping usually occurs in situations where producers in one country are trying to stay competitive with producers in another country but in this case, US shrimper John Williams argued that foreign shrimpers were trying to eliminate the producers in the US in order to gain a larger share of the world market. John Williams founded the Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) in 2002 to assist US shrimpers fight the increasing competition from foreign produced shrimp- mainly from Latin America and Asia. The SSA obtained signatures on petitions and hired a law firm to put forth a dumping complaint that would lead to an investigation by the US Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission. The claim was that farmers in Asia and Latin America were taking advantage of their region’s warm climate and cheap labor- (areas where the US does not have a competitive advantage) to raise shrimp in ponds. Unlike US domestic shrimp that are harvested from the ocean, the foreign producers were able to raise shrimp in carefully controlled conditions in inland ponds. The manufactured shrimp could produce three harvests per year- more than the US annual harvest- and allowed the foreign shrim ...