Turkey may impose duties on Indonesian cooking set

Turkey, notorious for imposing punitive tariffs on Indonesia’s exports, may launch a similar move on Indonesian-made stoppers, lids and other cooking set closures that are all made of glass, says the Trade Ministry.

The Turkish Trade Authority has accused two Indonesian producers PT Sinar Baru Abadi and PT Pakta Abadi Gemilang — both situated in East Java — of dumping.

The Turkish Trade Authority has accused Pakta of being uncooperative for returning questionnaires late. Pakta, however, maintains that it received the questionnaires from the Authority one month after Sinar Baru did, a state official says.

“[Pakta] has been labelled as not fully cooperative… It could face much higher anti-dumping duties than [Sinar Baru],” the Trade Ministry’s director for trade security Ernawati said Friday at her office.

She also said that, of the many cases handled by the ministry, “we’re often late receiving [documents] from Turkey”. The ministry, according to Ernawati, blames the frequent lag of information in regard to cases initiated by Turkey on its inability to understand Turkish government announcements on their official website.

“The English version [of the website] is uploaded much later,” she said. Turkey has so far imposed punitive tariffs on all 13 categories of Indonesian goods, of which 11 face anti-dumping duties and two safeguard measures. Indonesian products subjected to punitive tariffs in Turkey include matches, motorcycle and bicycle tires and tubes and synthetic fibers. anti-dumping duties are imposed to counter dumping, in which an exporter sells their products in a country at prices below its production costs and/or below prices in its home market.

A safeguard measure is a mechanism under the World Trade Organization, which allows governments to protect specific home industries from the negative impacts of a spike in imports of any products causing serious damage to a domestic industry that produces directly competing products, by imposing high additional fees.

According to the Trade Ministry’s data, two Turkish companies filed a petition with the Turkish Trade Authority over the alleged dumping of stoppers, lids and other cooking set closures — all made of glass — imported from Indonesia, China and Hong Kong.

The two Turkish producers control 78 percent of total national production of those products.