China continues to expand its labor transfer programs for Uyghurs and other minorities, despite a recognition in the U.S. and elsewhere that the programs are a form of forced labor, a new report from the Jamestown Foundation said. "State work plans for this year mandate an intensification of employment requirements for the region’s targeted ethnic groups, and official labor transfer statistics reflect heightened work requirements first introduced in 2021," the report said. "Xinjiang’s focus on these requirements intensifies the region’s forced labor risk, extending it into higher-skilled sectors while concealing its coercive nature."
CBP has detained thousands of Porsche, Bentley and Audi cars in U.S. ports after a supplier to parent company Volkswagen found a "Chinese subcomponent" in the vehicles that violated the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the Financial Times reported on Feb. 14. The delivery will be delayed until as late as the end of March, the paper said.
CBP in January identified 424 shipments valued at more than $236 million for further examination based on the suspected use of forced labor, including goods subject to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and withhold release orders, the agency said in its most recent operational statistics update. The value of those shipments is up from December, when CBP identified 450 shipments worth more than $187 million (see 2401260077). Also in January, CBP seized 1,814 shipments that contained counterfeit goods valued at more than $718 million if the items had been genuine, the agency said.
EU members last week postponed a vote on new rules that could require companies to conduct specific due diligence on their supply chains to address various environmental and social concerns, including forced labor risks.
Midway through the second term of solar safeguards, imports of solar panels (modules) and cells have been climbing, and the market has almost entirely shifted to bifacial solar panels, which were at first carved out of the safeguard. Whether a decision to revoke that exclusion in 2019 was legal is still being litigated (see 2311130031 and 2401290014).
Forbes reported that Walmart's online platform and Amazon have listings for canned tomatoes or tomato paste from the brands Nina, Gino and Zehrat Safa, and it said those brands are produced by Heibei Tomato Industry. That Chinese company says on "its website that 'raw materials come from Xinjiang,'" the article said.
Waaree Energies Ltd., an Indian solar panel manufacturer that accounts for about 9% of U.S. imports, has been buying solar cells from Longi, a Chinese manufacturer that Sheffield Hallam University tied to Xinjiang polysilicon.
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The Chinese government is going out of its way to evade forced labor laws by making supply chains less transparent, including by limiting access to corporate information online with "heavy" censorship, Yalkun Uluyol, a researcher at the Forced Labour Lab at Sheffield Hallam University, said at a U.K. Parliament hearing Feb. 6.
Because the FDA is not able to inspect foreign pharmaceutical factories with enough frequency -- and because the quality of those inspections is compromised by several factors -- some suggest that more imported drugs should be inspected at the border to ensure quality.