Commerce has found Indian paprika extract dumped at up to 5.78 percent, and the column of zeroes beside those margins is not the rate importers will post

There is a column of zeroes in the rate table. Nobody is going to post zero.

Commerce filed its final determination in the antidumping investigation of oleoresin paprika from India for public inspection on 20 August. The finding is affirmative: the extract is being sold, or is likely to be sold, in the United States at less than fair value. The period examined runs from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

The margins are modest by the standards of this beat. Synthite Industries Pvt. Ltd. comes out at 5.78 percent and Mane Kancor Ingredients Private Ltd. at 4.24 percent, both verified in person between April and June, with sales reports dated 23 June and cost reports 6 July. Everybody else gets 5.08 percent, weighted from the two respondents' publicly ranged sales values.

The second column

Beside each of those three numbers sits a second one headed cash deposit rate adjusted for subsidy offsets, and all three read 0.00. Commerce normally reduces an antidumping deposit by whatever export subsidies it has countervailed in the companion case, and here that reduction swallows the margin whole.

Then the notice takes it back. Because suspension of liquidation of the provisional measures in the countervailing duty case has been discontinued, it says, Commerce is not instructing Customs and Border Protection to collect deposits on the adjusted basis at this time. The operative instruction in the same section is the ordinary one, a deposit equal to the company-specific margin or, for anyone not named, the all-others rate. So the zeroes describe an arithmetic that is not currently in force, and an importer reading only the right hand column would post nothing and be wrong.

One wrinkle sits underneath that. The sentence justifying the offset says Commerce made an affirmative final countervailing duty determination, and the footnote attached to it cites the preliminary one, published on 6 February. The next footnote cites the same preliminary determination and gives 5 June as the last day provisional measures could run. This desk did not retrieve any countervailing duty final determination and makes no claim about whether one exists.

What is still open

Critical circumstances were found not to exist, for both respondents and for all others, so nothing reaches back before the preliminary determination. Suspension of liquidation continues for entries made on or after 2 April.

The International Trade Commission now has 45 days to decide whether the domestic industry is injured. If it says no, the proceeding ends, every deposit is refunded and suspension is lifted.

The scope is tighter than the word paprika suggests. It covers the colouring additive, a viscous red or orange liquid extracted from Capsicum peppers, and only where it carries an American Spice Trade Association value of at least 500 or a colour unit value of at least 20,000. Food labels know it as E160c. Blending it with oil, water, emulsifiers or preservatives does not take it out, and neither does finishing or repacking it in a third country.

The list of issues the parties argued is printed at the back of the notice, and it includes the allocation of joint production costs between co-products, adverse inferences for errors found at the cost verifications, unreported marine insurance expenses at Synthite, and whether to set up a certification process with customs. How each was resolved sits in the Issues and Decision Memorandum, which is not this document and was not retrieved.