The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) held a workshop on November 4 to discuss tools to protect businesses against trade defence lawsuits in export markets in the context of integration.

Pham Chau Giang, Deputy Director General of the MoIT’s Trade Remedies Authority, said that Vietnamese firms have faced more than 200 lawsuits related to trade defence, which includes anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguard measures.

Since the beginning of 2020, the number of the lawsuits doubled that in the same period last year to 34 cases.

Recently, Vietnamese mattress exporters have faced trade defence petitions in the US market, with a risk of a tax rate of 100-200%.

Earlier, a number of Vietnamese steel products have been imposed with tax rates of 250-400%, which also means the US market shuts its door down for those products.

Giang said that currently, the total value of Vietnamese exports subject to trade defence measures amounts to US$12 billion.

Meanwhile, Vietnam is investigating into six trade defence cases, along with 13 anti-dumping, one anti-subsidy and six safeguarding cases.

Giang held that the effective application of trade defence measures has helped save trillions of VND each year, supporting businesses to overcome difficulties and protecting the interest of domestic manufacturing sectors.

In the future, the MoIT will speed up the implementation of building capacity in trade defence, while completing the legal system in the field, tightening the coordination between businesses, trade associations and authorised agencies, and strengthening communications and human resources training to deal with the problem, she said.