India imposes anti-dumping duty on some steel imports from Vietnam
This comes a year after the ministry initiated a probe on some steel imports from the Southeast Asian country to analyse threats and consequential injury to India's steel sector.
The duty is on some hot-rolled flat products of alloy or non-alloy steel, the ministry said in a notification dated Wednesday.
"Domestic steel industry has suffered injury as a result of dumped imports," it said. "The injury margin is positive and significant."
The ministry flagged further threats to local mills if anti-dumping duties are not levied on other select goods from Vietnam.
In April, India imposed a 12% temporary tariff on some steel imports, locally known as a safeguard duty, to curb a surge in cheap shipments primarily from China.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
At 23, she set out to modernize the spice trade. Now she's navigating Trump's tariffs
In 2016, turmeric lattes were all the rage, but Sana Javeri Kadri thought the ones in San Francisco, where she lives, tasted nothing like the fresh spices she grew up with in India. A former line cook who was doing marketing for a Bay Area grocer, Javeri Kadri 'knew [her] way around spices', but was new to the industry. Still, she booked a ticket home to Mumbai, hoping that she could get richer flavors into US pantries. After reaching out to a number of growers, she met an organic turmeric farmer and, using her tax refund and a loan from her parents, bought a batch of the crop. It became the foundation of Diaspora Co, which Javeri Kadri launched the following year at just 23. From the outset, Javeri Kadri aimed to bypass industrial spice farms, whose products she found bland, and instead source from farmers using regenerative practices. This meant working directly with the producers and paying them a living wage. 'By rough math, I probably reached out to around 2,500 farmers,' she said. After two years of growing a US market for her turmeric, Javeri Kadri added black pepper to the mix. For a while after that, it was an 'exponential growth curve', she said. Today Diaspora Co has 24 employees and sells around 40 different spices and blends, sourced from 140 different farms in India and Sri Lanka. Diaspora Co is part of a wave of new spice companies, including Burlap & Barrel and Spicewalla, that center sourcing from sustainable farms, paying producers a living wage, building a more transparent (and streamlined) supply chain – steps they say allow them to put noticeably fresher spices on the market. Javeri Kadri said it was common knowledge in the industry that because of the long supply chains, it can take years for spices to reach consumers, meaning they are 'expired before they even get to you'. She said Diaspora Co farmers rotate their crops, maintain plant diversity and use water-retention systems – regenerative practices that not only minimize the farms' carbon footprint, but also make them more resilient to climate shocks. That meant when extreme flooding struck Tamil Nadu, India, last year, Diaspora's cardamom farm 'had such great aerated soil and such good irrigation, they were only in standing water for a few hours before the soil and the property was able to flush itself clean', minimizing losses, she said. Javeri Kadri stressed that her partners were already practicing sustainable agriculture before she arrived on the scene, but she connects them with each other. 'If you get them talking, they problem-solve themselves,' she said. 'They're all experts.' Diaspora Co enjoys low worker turnover and lasting partnerships, something Javeri Kadri attributes to the company's commitment to fair wages. 'Once we build a relationship with them, it never goes anywhere,' she said. In 2022, Diaspora Co launched a fund for farm workers, offering financial literacy workshops and providing seed money to open bank accounts, among other things. At a cardamom farm, workers asked for a community room and kitchen, which Javeri Kadri admitted wasn't what she expected. But 'it's what they need, not what we think sitting in America that they need,' she said. 'Really the point of it is that we listen to the workers directly.' Franco Fubini, a Diaspora Co board member and founder and CEO of sustainable food sourcing platform Natoora, said Javeri Kadri wasn't just 'trading spices', she was building a unique supply chain and helping to catalyze demand for products that 'are created in harmony with nature'. He added: 'Whenever you have a company that is creating a market by stimulating demand, buying the right product, paying the right price for it, and creating a healthy farming ecosystem – that is what revolutionizing the food system is all about.' Diaspora's efforts to, as Javeri Kadri puts it, 'decolonize the spice trade' have also proven profitable. She's raised about $2.5m from angel investors in the last few years, and though she declined to share revenue numbers, she said the company had grown twentyfold over the past five years. Its spices are now sold in 400 US stores, and last year, with help from Natoora, Diaspora Co expanded into the UK. Rather than pressuring existing partners to produce more and more, which could tax the land (and workers), Javeri Kadri said she plans to keep adding new farm partners in order to continue to boost production. Javeri Kadri has other projects on the horizon, including a new Masala Chai tea blend, another blend developed with the former Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, and a cookbook featuring recipes from partner farms. 'A lot of people tell me, 'Oh, Indian food is intimidating or heavy or complicated,' and the whole premise of the book is, how do we make it as bright and fresh and accessible as possible?' Javeri Kadri said. She plans to roll out these projects while managing an altogether new challenge: This month, Donald Trump said he would raise tariffs on Indian products to 50%, a move that Javeri Kadri predicts will cost her company between $100,000 and $200,000 by the end of the year, leaving her no choice but to eventually raise prices. (She said they had already paid about $20,000 in tariffs since April, when the US imposed its initial levies.) Javeri Kadri's entire business model is built on sourcing spices from the areas they are indigenous to in south Asia, which means she couldn't pivot her supply chain even if she wanted to. 'People will say, 'Well, we don't need those exotic ingredients anyway,'' she said. But, she added, 'there's nothing as American as apple pie. And apple pie relies on cinnamon. An American classic is vanilla ice cream; we don't grow vanilla. A lot of these ingredients are inherently not exotic, but they come from elsewhere.' Tariffs could have an especially devastating effect on mission-driven companies like Diaspora, which operate on small margins even as they prioritize single-source farms and fair labor, said David Ortega, the Noel W Stuckman chair in food economics and policy at Michigan State University. 'These tariff price increases can really jeopardize those priorities.' With the higher tariffs – and the economic uncertainty surrounding trade policy – Javeri Kadri acknowledges that it may be hard to grow in the US market over the coming years. Her approach? 'We grow elsewhere. We go where we're not penalized for doing business,' she said. 'It's very simple.'
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
When Trump tariffs hit French barrels and corks, California's winemakers feel the squeeze
Kory Burke, a small producer of high-quality wines in central California, never believed that tariffs on imports from France or Italy could help boost his business. But he knew for sure they would be a big hindrance as soon as Donald Trump announced late last month that he was slapping a 15% levy on all goods from the European Union. 'The first email I received was from my cork provider,' Burke recalled. 'He said he'd take on 2% of the additional cost of importing corks from Europe, but I would have to absorb the other 13%. Then my barrel supplier got in touch, pushing me to put in my orders as fast as possible because every new French barrel coming across the Atlantic after the tariffs was going to come with a $100 or $150 fee.' Every one of these messages was a gut punch for Burke's five-year-old family-run business, Dresser Winery, which sits on an idyllic hillside outside Paso Robles and specializes in big, bold reds. Burke sent a note out to his wine club members earlier this year telling them he did not plan on increasing prices for the fall shipment, but he realized he could no longer honor the commitment. 'If we do that,' he said flatly, 'we have to shut the business down.' It turns out even US wine producers are heavily reliant on foreign components – everything from French oak barrels, which give the wine a buttery, vanilla finish in contrast to the much less appealing brown sugar taste of American oak, to glass bottles and corks and the wine-making equipment itself. 'Every single product we use, from our pumps to the de-stemmer, comes with instructions written in six languages,' Burke explained. 'Could we produce some of these things here? Sure, but it would take three years to get production up and running, and that's not the way the specialization has been.' As another producer from Paso Robles, Paul Hoover of Still Waters Vineyards, put it: 'The only thing in my bottles made in America is the wine.' Ostensibly, Trump's tariffs on imported goods are supposed to give a competitive boost to American entrepreneurs like Burke and Hoover. But the theory does not really apply to the wine business – not only because so many of the materials used to make California wine come from overseas, but also because people do not buy wine based on price alone. 'It is a fundamental misunderstanding of wine drinkers and the wine marketplace,' the National Association of Wine Retailers, an industry lobby group, said in a blistering statement in response to the 15% tariff announcement. 'Champagne is not sparkling wine. Bordeaux is not simply cabernet sauvignon or merlot … America's independent fine wine retailers understand better than most that when an American wine drinker asks for red Burgundy, they do not substitute Oregon pinot noir when the Burgundy is out of their price range or unavailable. They simply don't make a purchase.' Burke echoed this sentiment, saying he had to control his reaction recently when a Trump supporter came to his winery and told him he must be excited about the business opportunities the tariffs will create. 'People aren't buying my bottles because of tariffs on French wines, that's for sure,' he said. 'If anything, I'm competing against other Californian and American wines. With European wines, it's not a real competition at all. They're very different regions, very different products.' California wines are far from the cheapest because of the high cost of land and labour in the Golden state. For that reason, many producers live or die by the quality of what they make and the sort of subtle distinctions that come from varietals grown in a particular microclimate, or in a particular soil, or aged in a particular barrel. Price still matters, because fine wines are a discretionary spending item, and if the economy or people's personal finances are struggling it is often one of the first things that consumers stop buying. The National Association of Wine Retailers, said it was worried about tariffs generally, not just on wine, because inflation and an uncertain business climate would hurt its members' bottom line just as much. 'The increased costs of living that will result from the recently enacted tariffs, along with the significant increase in prices for wines … will only push down consumption further, thereby harming the American wine industry to a degree from which many of its participants will not recover,' the group said. In Paso Robles, which has seen an explosion in the number of wineries over the past two decades to about 250 and has become a major weekend tourist hub for wine lovers from San Francisco and Los Angeles, some of the harmful effects are being felt already. Joel Peterson, executive director of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, said international orders were drying up as the reverberations from Trump's trade war echo around the globe. 'We have wine sitting in a warehouse that is specially labeled for the Canadian market that producers can't sell,' he said. 'We've had no orders from the UK since Trump's so-called Liberation Day in April. People are scared to order those wines.' Domestic retailers say they have not seen significant price increases kick in yet – for either domestic or European wines – but are already starting to struggle simply because of the uncertainty created by the White House's constantly shifting messages on where and at what rate it intends to impose tariffs. 'We're not in a recession but it's what I call a recess market,' said Jim Knight, co-owner of the Wine House in Los Angeles, which specializes in small-label boutique wines from the United States and around the world. 'People have money, they're just not spending it … If the president made a decision and stuck with it, we could plan for it. But we haven't been able to plan for it.' Knight's business has a particular problem with high-end French wines it bought in advance years ago – right after the grapes were harvested – and presold to customers with an anticipated 10% mark-up. When tariffs on European wines were briefly at 10% earlier this year, Knight was looking at his entire profit being wiped out, since tariffs are imposed when goods arrive in the United States, not when they are purchased. Now, at 15%, he's looking at taking a loss that might force him to lay off workers or otherwise shrink his business. For now, he is letting the wine sit in a temperature-controlled storage unit in France and hoping Trump might still bend to pressure from the industry to create a tariff exception for wines and spirits. An industry initiative called Toasts not Tariffs has been lobbying the White House hard to do exactly that. More broadly, Knight said he was worried that small European producers would no longer offer their limited production to the US market, and that some of the specialist importers, the ones who love the same smaller label wines he does, will go out of business. 'Importers of wine from the European Union are American businesses too,' he remarked. That helps explain why a US distributor of European wines and spirits, VOS Selections of New York, has been the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Trump's tariffs – a case that led to an initial ruling against the administration in the court of international trade at the end of May. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has spearheaded the suit, said the nature of the wine business was a vivid illustration of the harm that tariffs can do. 'Many of the wines our client imports simply cannot be produced in the United States because of differences in climate, soil and other factors,' he said. 'We're not benefiting American industry, we're damaging it and hurting consumers.' Not every wine producer sees the economic outlook as uniformly gloomy. Hoover, of Still Waters Vineyards, said the cost of storing and transporting wine was a greater burden than the price of corks or bottles – particularly for California producers who have too much inventory on their hands following a post-Covid boom-and-bust cycle. He said he was relieved at a drop in fuel prices in recent months and saw opportunities if they fell further. He was modestly hopeful, for example, that he could tap into sales opportunities on the east coast where he was previously priced out. 'Before the tariffs, a boat coming from Europe could deliver wine to the east coast more efficiently than I could getting it across the United States on a truck,' he said. 'Let's see how that looks going forward. Energy costs are the key to this. Let's hope the tariffs don't monkey that up.' One of the main reasons that people in the wine business do not believe the tariffs will benefit domestic producers, as the White House is promising, is that they have seen this scenario play out before, during Trump's first term as president. In 2019, the administration imposed a 25% tariff on most European wines, among other products, in retaliation for European subsidies on Airbus passenger jets. Trump said at the time that the relatively low price of French wines was unfair to California producers, but no evidence emerged that the tariff did anything to redress that perceived unfairness. 'It did not increase my domestic wine sales at all,' Knight said.
Reuters
5 hours ago
- Reuters
Indian miner IREL seeks Japan, South Korea partnerships for rare earth magnet production
NEW DELHI, Aug 14 (Reuters) - India's state-owned miner IREL is seeking to collaborate with Japanese and South Korean companies to start commercial production of rare earth magnets, a source familiar with the matter said, as part of efforts to reduce reliance on China. The company is looking at both Japan and South Korea for rare earth processing technology, potentially through government-to-government channels, the source said, declining to be named as the discussions are not public. The miner aims to formalise talks with other countries on rare earth mining and technology partnerships and plans to seek IREL board approval for commercial magnet production this year, the source said. IREL and the Department of Atomic Energy, which oversees the company, did not respond to requests for comment. India currently lacks commercial-scale facilities to refine and separate the full range of rare earth elements to high-purity levels. China, which controls the bulk of global rare earth mining, suspended exports of a wide range of rare earths and related magnets in April, upending the supply chains central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, and semiconductor companies among others that use them. IREL has also approached Toyotsu Rare Earths India, a unit of Japanese trading house Toyota Tsusho (8015.T), opens new tab, to seek help in reaching out to companies in Japan for processing of rare earth materials, the source said. The source said IREL had an initial meeting with Toyotsu to explore whether it could engage Japanese magnet manufacturers, with one proposal involving the possibility of a Japanese company setting up a plant in India. Toyota Tsusho and Toyotsu Rare Earths India did not immediately comment. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, in charge of rare earths, did not immediately respond to a Reuters email seeking comment. In June, Reuters reported that India asked IREL to suspend a 13-year-old rare earth export agreement with Japan to conserve domestic supplies. IREL is prepared to supply rare earth element neodymium oxide to a technology partner, who would then produce the magnets and send them back to India, the source said. The state miner currently has the capacity to produce 400–500 metric tons of neodymium annually, the source said, noting that output could increase depending on the terms of the collaboration. IREL also plans to expand domestic rare earth mining and processing. In India, rare earth mining is restricted to IREL, which supplies the Department of Atomic Energy with materials for nuclear power and defence-related applications. The company is also exploring potential rare earth mining opportunities in Argentina, Australia, Malawi and Myanmar, the source said.
