The Fortnight in Brief: Two US duty actions on steel products, a Canadian partnership and a Brazilian duty on PET resin
Commerce published antidumping and countervailing duty orders on Vietnamese steel rebar on September 18. Hoa Phat's antidumping margin is 128.53 percent; the countervailing rate is 6.80 percent for Hoa Phat and all others.
Four days later Commerce preliminarily found that steel wire hangers finished in Cambodia from Chinese or Vietnamese wire circumvent the existing orders. Unless the wire is certified as Chinese, entries back to August 12, 2025 take Vietnam's rates of 220.68 percent antidumping and 31.58 percent countervailing. Case briefs are due today.
Canada and Vietnam upgraded to a Strategic Partnership on September 24, renewing their SPS memorandum and welcoming a new Agriculture Dialogue.
Brazil's government set a new antidumping duty this month and its fish industry wants a quota. GECEX Resolution 958, published September 4, puts a duty of $160.87 a tonne on Vietnamese PET resin for up to five years. Abipesca, which represents Brazil's fish-processing industry, has proposed an annual tilapia-fillet import quota of about 16,200 tonnes from all origins, CNN Brasil reported on September 15. Brazil imported about 8,000 tonnes of tilapia fillets from Vietnam in the first half of 2026, according to the same report.
Brazil's PET case is one of 327 trade-remedy investigations from 27 markets that Vietnam's Trade Remedies Authority now counts against its exports. Twenty-seven of them were opened this year by mid-September, more than in all of 2025.
Policy Watch: A US agreement could close Vietnam's 2.5-point gap and leave its duty orders where they are
The US tariff number an agreement with Vietnam is most likely to move is 2.5 percentage points, and the agreements Washington signed with Cambodia and Malaysia in October 2025 show both why and how far that reaches.
What was said in New York
Jamieson Greer told General Secretary and President Tô Lâm in New York on September 21 that the two negotiating teams had come very close to a final result ("đến rất gần kết quả cuối cùng", in Nhân Dân's account). In the same account, Tô Lâm asked for an overall approach to the outstanding trade issues, including those tied to Section 301 investigations, a category that covers the intellectual-property investigation USTR opened after naming Vietnam a Priority Foreign Country in April. USTR's press office has published no readout of the meeting. Tô Lâm told Bloomberg TV the same day, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, that Vietnam does not accept transshipment and that its exports must be products manufactured in Vietnam.
What the published agreements contain
USTR's final action in the forced-labor Section 301 investigations gives 10 percent to an economy that imposes a forced-labor import prohibition, commits to one through an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, or runs a partial regime. Every other economy, Vietnam included, pays 12.5 percent. The agreements with Cambodia and Malaysia, signed October 26, 2025, both carry that commitment (Article 2.8 and Article 2.9 respectively), and both commit the partner to enforce measures against transshipment and other evasion of US duties and to sign a duty evasion cooperation agreement with the United States (Article 5.3). Malaysia sits on the 10 percent list with two years from entry into force to implement its commitment, and it is not among the economies USTR says had adopted a prohibition by July. A Vietnamese text built on the same template would hand USTR a document its own rule names.
Vietnam is not among the 12 additional economies that USTR's September 15 release says had adopted prohibitions "by July 2026," although Nghị định 292, issued July 22 and in force since September 5, bans imports of goods made wholly or partly with forced labor. The July notice sets out no dedicated route for re-tiering an economy once its rate is fixed; it points only to the general authority in Section 307 of the Trade Act to modify an action.
What an agreement leaves in place
Malaysia's text keeps trade remedies outside the bargain. Article 7.4 provides that "Nothing in this Agreement shall constrain … a Party from imposing additional tariffs to remedy unfair trade practices …" Antidumping and countervailing orders are set on domestic petitions, company by company, which is how Hoa Phat's rebar reached 128.53 percent three days before Greer met Tô Lâm.
A buyer pricing 2027 contracts should model the Section 301 rate at 12.5 percent with 10 percent as the upside case on signature, and model every duty-order product at its current rate regardless. The hanger case shows where a transshipment clause is likely to get its teeth, in certification regimes Commerce already runs. That last point is my reading of the two published texts; neither government has said it.
The EU amendment that puts instant coffee, the product Vietnam's coffee sector is betting its upgrade on, under the deforestation regulation from December 2027, and what that means for every bean a processor buys; the eight-row Tracker; and this fortnight's pangasius, fruit and trade-balance numbers.
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