Dumping on U.S. Farmers: Are There Biases in Global Antidumping Regulations?

The explosion of antidumping activity over the past 10 years has raised concern among agriculture analysts that antidumping regulations are biased toward imposing more protection on U.S. agricultural goods than other products. This research fails to find a statistically significant bias in the outcomes of antidumping investigations involving agricultural goods compared to other products, nor does it find significant evidence that foreign antidumping investigations into imports of food products have resulted in higher levels of protection than U.S. investigations. However, the results from a comprehensive case study analysis suggest that despite the lack of statistical evidence of bias, U.S. agricultural producers have reason to question the fairness of global antidumping regulations. Given these results, government officials should consider whether U.S. food producers could be better served by changes to both U.S. antidumping regulations and the World Trade Organization Antidumping Agreement.