India's shrimp exporters heaved a sigh of relief last week following the decision of World Trade Organisation's anti-dumping panel to set July 24 as the deadline for the final hearing on the issue.

India's marine export industry, particularly the shrimp sector, has high hopes after the three-day preliminary hearing held in Geneva from June 6-8.

The Indian team had argued strongly against the duty and the customs bond requirement and pointed out that the US Department of Commerce (DoC) had violated the WTO principles in calculating the anti-dumping duty. Officials said the US delegation's arguments were based on non-filing of Q&A questionnaire for the first administrative review by 17 exporters from India.

Indian side said that most of the exporters on the list had stopped exports to the US. The total export of all these 17 exporters comes to below one per cent of the total Indian exports to the US market.

The recent decision of the DoC in favour of Ecuador has also raised Indian hopes. The DoC had decided to eliminate the anti-dumping duty on frozen warm-water shrimp imported from Ecuador.

The DoC has issued a preliminary ruling in this regard and the final ruling is expected by August 20, 2007. According to the ruling, the 3.58 per cent duty imposed on Ecuador will be revoked in the light of a WTO order to recalculate the duty rates. The WTO instruction in the case of Ecuador may influence India's case also.

The DoC had to recalculate the tariff because the method of calculating the duty, widely known as zeroing, violates the WTO norms. In the first administrative review, the DoC had raised the weighted average duty from 10.17 per cent to 10.54 per cent and also fixed a punitive rate of 82.30 per cent on 17 Indian exporters who had not responded to the review. The final rates according to the first review would be announced by August.