American farmers struggling with the high cost of fertilizer got some good news from the International Trade Commission on proposed UAN tariffs. The U.S. International Trade Commission unanimously voted to reject anti-dumping and countervailing duties on imports of urea ammonium nitrate, or UAN, from Russia and Trinidad and Tobago.
Dave Salmonsen, senior director of government affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation, says the case before the ITC started a year ago.
“This case was brought by CF industries about a year ago in a petition to the ITC to impose duties because they said that there were dumping, and unfair subsidies being placed on these fertilizer exports that were hurting their business. But the International Trade Commission, after a couple of hearings, and lots of evidence from both sides, decided that the duty should not be imposed.”
This decision means that American farmers won’t have to pay additional costs on fertilizer from those countries.
“The effect of having these duties on those companies in those countries is they wouldn’t export to the U.S. and, of course, those will be imposed, since they couldn’t sell it at a competitive price, those companies wouldn’t export to the U.S. and would allow for U.S. domestic manufacturers to have their prices higher. What this will mean going forward is at least you won’t have this additional cost placed on what are already higher fertilizer prices for UAN.”
Salmonsen explains what’s next for the U.S. fertilizer industry.
“We should start seeing some more product come into the US from Russia and Trinidad-Tobago, and that should have an impact on prices. About 80 percent of all of our UAN imports were coming from those two countries, so we definitely, over time now, should start to see some more products move from overseas into the U.S. market now that they’re not having the threat of these import duties placed on them.”
