Trade issues background paper: The impact of dumping on trade in fisheries products

Put simply, dumping is the exporting of produce at less than production cost to the material detriment of competitor industries in the importing country. The recourse by the plaintiff – the importing country - is to impose import bans and/or compensating duties (duty orders) on the rogue products in legitimate protection of their own industry – i.e. a re-levelling of the playing field. These are called Anti- Dumping Measures (ADMs). Theoretically this is a technical issue that should be subject to economic logic and legal argument. In practice it is highly political, can be arbitrary and is often raised at the behest of an industry finding its self-unable to compete for harsh but fair economic reasons