India has emerged as the largest exporter of shrimp  to the US market, for the first time in the history of seafood trade, in 2013. Overtaking Thailand, India had shipped 94,000 tones of shrimp to USA valued at US $1 billion. Roughly 50% of India’s total shrimp export was to USA. Now India became eighth largest exporter of food items, including Spices and Seafood, to the United States.

Asserting that the U.S. “cannot afford to stand on the sidelines of trade,” U.S. Vice President Joe Biden penned an op-ed in the Financial Times  on Thursday laying out the economic and strategic case for the Obama Administration’s current trade agenda. His comments are part of a larger effort happening in public and behind the scenes as the Administration pushes for the conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in the face of opposition from its own party.

(Reuters) - A standoff between the United States and Japan is holding up talks on a sweeping Pacific free trade pact and a lack of authority to push an eventual deal through the U.S. Congress without amendment may be undercutting Washington's hand. After weekend talks in Singapore, including two separate sessions between Japan and the United States, Japanese Economics Minister Akira Amari said "considerable gaps" remained with the United States on bread-and-butter issues like farm tariffs.

OTTAWA--Canada should find out in June if it's been successful in a long-running dispute over a contentious U.S. meat-labeling rule. A World Trade Organization panel is expected to issue a confidential interim report to the governments on June 20, according to a person familiar with the matter. The final report is expected a month later, on July 22, according to this person, who has seen the timelines for the decision. The panel heard oral submissions from the governments last week in the dispute over country-of-origin labeling, known as COOL.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. trade panel voted Friday to extend antidumping and countervailing duties on laminated woven sacks from China after the first five-year review of the measures imposed initially in 2008. The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) voted against revoking the existing duty orders on laminated woven sacks from China, saying it "would be likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of material injury within a reasonably foreseeable time. "

PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry has suggested the government not to impose anti-dumping duty on mports of Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) into India in view of its demand supply mismatch, which according to latest estimates stands at 4,096,952 MT against 3,420,000 MT.

NEW DELHI: India has imposed a safeguard duty on import of a chemical used by pharmaceutical and dye industries for 15 months to protect domestic producers.  The Finance Ministry imposed the safeguard duty on Sodium Nitrite (the chemical) following recommendation for the same by the Directorate General of Safeguards (DGS).  Safeguard duty is a WTO-compatible temporary measure that is brought in for a certain time-frame to avert any damage to a country's domestic industry from cheap imports. 

The Latin American economic bloc Mercosur has nearly concluded a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said on February 24.

Chinese authorities have confirmed that the additional duties for imports from the EU were removed on 19 February 2014. According to WTO rules, anti-dumping duties can only be imposed under strict conditions where injurious dumping occurs, i.e. when foreign products are sold below fair value and cause damage to industry in the importing country.

HA NOI (VNS) — Viet Nam gained a trade surplus of US$244 million in the first two months of this year, the General Statistics Office (GSO) reported. During the first two months of this year, the nation saw a year-on-year increase of 12.3 per cent in total export value to reach $21.06 billion and of 17 per cent in total import value to reach $20.816 billion. Le Thi Minh Thuy, head of the GSO's Trade Department, told Viet Nam News that the national trade surplus from the first two months was due to a trade surplus in the foreign direct investment (FDI) economic sector.