Opinion ID: 442193
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: issues

Text: 2 We address two issues: (1) whether the lower court erred as a matter of law in holding that the aggregate data for Revere Sugar Corporation (Revere) did not constitute best information available; 1 and (2) whether the lower court erred in finding that the ITC injury determination was unsupported by substantial evidence on the record.Background 3 We have before us the most recent 2 of five Court of International Trade decisions 3 concerning this Canadian sugar antidumping case. The case began in March 1979 when United States sugar producer Amstar filed an antidumping petition with the U.S. Treasury Department, alleging injury by reason of dumped imports of Canadian sugar (imports sold at less than fair value) and requesting relief in the form of antidumping duties on those imports. 4 Treasury exercised its right, under the law then in effect, to refer the case to the ITC for a preliminary injury assessment. In May 1979 the ITC determined that sufficient evidence of injury existed to warrant Treasury's continued investigation of the alleged dumping. In reaching this determination the ITC focused on data for injury to a regional, as opposed to a nationwide, sugar industry located in the Northeastern/Great Lakes area. 4 In early November 1979 Treasury found sales at less than fair value, with dumping margins on the Canadian sugar of approximately 20 percent. Consequently, the ITC promptly instituted its final injury investigation. Then, on January 1, 1980, the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 5 became effective, providing 75 days for the ITC to make a final material injury determination in any pending antidumping case. 6 More importantly, the new law specified precisely the criteria which the ITC was to apply in defining a regional industry: 7 5 (C) Regional industries 6 In appropriate circumstances, the United States, for a particular product market, may be divided into 2 or more markets and the producers within each market may be treated as if they were a separate industry if-- 7 (i) the producers within such market sell all or almost all of their production of the like product in question in that market, and 8 (ii) the demand in that market is not supplied, to any substantial degree, by producers of the product in question located elsewhere in the United States. 9 In such appropriate circumstances, material injury    of an industry may be found to exist with respect to an industry    if there is a concentration of    dumped imports into such an isolated market and if the producers of all, or almost all, of the production within that market are being materially injured    by reason of the    dumped imports. 10 During the final injury investigatory period the ITC staff endeavored to collect the extensive data necessary to determine whether a northeastern states' sugar industry existed which satisfied the above new, strict statutory definition, and, if so, what should be the scope of the region. This involved, among many other things, mailing questionnaires to the seven sugar producers in the suspected region, including the second largest, Revere. Revere's questionnaire, dated January 7, 1980, showed that Revere had three plants, located in Brooklyn, Boston, and Chicago. Revere gave the ITC confidential firm-wide data (i.e., aggregated for all three plants) covering such information as Revere's production, sales, distribution of net sales (broken out by northeastern as opposed to other states), and profit-and-loss and other financial data. 11 By the end of January 1980 the ITC staff, in its report containing preliminary findings of fact, proposed an 11-state northeastern area excluding Illinois and Maryland. This meant that Revere's Chicago plant would be excluded from the region, as well as the Baltimore and Chicago plants of the proposed region's largest producer, Amstar. The ITC staff then worked with Amstar to segregate its data to exclude its plants outside the region. The staff did not do this with Revere, but toward the end of the investigatory period the principal staff investigator did telephone Revere to inquire about individual plant data. According to an affidavit by that investigator, Revere officials told him that separate data on individual plant operations were not readily available. He also stated that Revere's president told him that the Chicago operation was relatively minor compared with the Boston and Brooklyn operations and that the Chicago operations were not significantly different from those of the other two plants. 12 The ITC staff presented its final report to the commissioners, and on March 6, 1980, they unanimously determined that an industry in the United States was being materially injured by reason of imports of sugars and syrups from Canada, which Treasury had determined to be sold in the United States at less than fair value. The commissioners defined the sugar industry according to the new statutory criteria and as recommended by the staff--the 11-state northeastern area. However, in the data on which the commissioners based their decision were the firm-wide Revere figures, which included the extra-regional Chicago plant. In Atlantic Sugar V the Court of International Trade held inclusion of the Chicago plant data to be contrary to law and to cause the ITC's final injury determination to be unsupported by substantial evidence, resulting in that court's vacating the final antidumping order. We review these aspects of that court's decision. 8