Board members and people who provide services to foreign-trade zones talked about what the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones should work on now that it lost the battle on USMCA rules of origin treatment for goods produced in those zones. “Now that provision’s back in the act, it’s going to be a real challenge,” said Melissa Irmen, chair of the NAFTZ board. The group wants to make sure a U.S.-United Kingdom free trade agreement doesn't prohibit goods made in FTZs from qualifying for rules of origin, as USMCA does. “They are concerned that the USMCA approach could be a precedent.”
American Association of Exporters and Importers CEO Marianne Rowden believes automation is going to replace a lot of tariff classification work over the coming years. “Will human beings be doing tariff classification in the next three to five years? I don't think so -- I think it’s all going to be done by machine,” Rowden told a National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones online conference Feb. 9. She also predicted that the moratorium on customs duties on digital transactions, such as downloads of games or movies, will end in the medium term. “Every two years there is a vote at the World Trade Organization on the moratorium on customs duties on digital transmissions,” she said. “I think we’re going to lose that vote probably within the next five to six years because governments, particularly developing countries, are so desperate for revenue.”
DSV is offering a new customs classification service to “provide a structured, straightforward process which can be used early in the company’s import and export planning activity,” DSV's Robert Wisniewski, customs manager, International Shared Service Center, said in a news release. The “service is divided into seven steps, where customs information about the goods is analysed, classified and validated by DSV customs classification experts on behalf of the customer,” the company said. “When all customs documents are ready to be handed over to the relevant authorities, DSV shares this with the customer.” Wisniewski said the classification team “consists of subject matter experts who have an in-depth understanding of global merchandise as well as the legal aspects of customs tariffs.”
U.S. importers in 2020 sourced record quantities of laptops, tablets and TVs to meet historically high demand for connectivity and home entertainment gear during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, according to Census Bureau data accessed Feb. 7 through the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb tool. The 125.68 million laptops and tablets shipped here in 2020 under tariff schedule subheading 8471.30.01 were up 22.6% from 2019 and the most in any year since Census began reporting that HTS category in 2007. Fourth-quarter shipments of 43.44 million laptops were the highest quarterly volume recorded, rising 18.4% sequentially from Q3 and 39.5% year over year.
The trade war initiated by the U.S. has forced Ford Motor to reevaluate the strategy of sourcing parts that are easily shipped from countries with the cheapest prices, said Hau Thai-Tang, chief operations officer for the company, during a Feb. 3 session of The Economist's World Trade Symposium.
Even though the Joe Biden administration will have a very different approach to trade than did the Trump administration, that will not mean a wholesale rejection of what its predecessors did, analysts said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies webinar Jan. 21.
The New York Times, relying on a Horizon Advisory report that used press accounts and government announcements of workers transported from Xinjiang, said that Chinese producers of polysilicon could be compromised by forced labor. The story, published Jan. 8, acknowledged that the news articles and announcements suggest that the number of transferred workers is very small compared with the overall factory workforce. But U.S. law bans imports of any input with any amount of forced labor. The companies identified by consultancy Horizon Advisory supply more than a third of the world's polysilicon, which is used to make solar panels, according to the report. Nathan Picarsic, a founder of Horizon Advisory, is quoted as saying “what the firm had documented was likely 'just the tip of the iceberg.' If Americans are buying solar panels made with materials from these Chinese companies, he said, 'I would say you are complicit in perpetuating this Chinese industrial policy that suppresses and disenfranchises human beings.'”
Blueberry growers, importers and distributors have formed a trade group called The Blueberry Coalition for Progress & Health to argue that there should not be tariffs or quotas on imported blueberries. In a Jan. 6 press release, the group said that 80% of imported fresh blueberries enter either before U.S. production begins in earnest in late April or after it peters out in early September. They said that even though there is some U.S. production competing with imports, even Georgia only sells 10% of its crop before that peak period. But Florida competes most directly with Mexican imports, and Florida representatives had pushed for trade remedies to protect them (see 2009020016). The International Trade Commission will hear from those for and against trade restrictions on blueberries on Jan. 12.
Amazon bought 11 Boeing 767-300 aircraft -- seven from Delta and four from WestJet -- that will join its leased air cargo network by 2022, it said Jan. 5. The goal is to continue delivering goods to customers “in the way that they expect from Amazon, and purchasing our own aircraft is a natural next step,” said Sarah Rhoads, vice president-Amazon Global Air. The company will continue to rely on third-party carriers to operate its fleet, it said.
The National Association of Beverage Importers accused the U.S. trade representative of throwing gasoline on the fire of the Airbus-Boeing dispute on his way out the door (see 2012310010). “The rationale of the timing selected by the EU Commission for the timing of the trade volume determination is a technical argument at best and one that does not merit the potential risk of the EU simply retaliating,” NABI President Robert Tobiassen said in an emailed news release Dec. 31.