The Senate Finance Committee chairman, joined by four Republicans and three other Democrats, asked the head of CBP to prioritize Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement and USMCA textile enforcement in the coming year, saying that American textile mills that are closing have said a key factor in weak demand for their yarns or fabric is "lack of effective customs enforcement."
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
Indonesia and the U.S. pledged together to take concrete steps to advance "occupational safety and health and fair wages and ensure employers uphold internationally recognized labor standards and comply with domestic labor law" in Indonesia's mines and processing facilities, as well as work to lower greenhouse gas emissions in their mineral supply chains, "including efforts to seek to promote clean and low-emission power for mineral processing."
A lead author of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is seeking to pass a law mandating the same treatment for goods containing cobalt refined in China. China’s Odious and Brutally Atrocious Labor Trafficking Supply Chain Act, or the Cobalt Supply Chain Act, would tell CBP that all cobalt refined in China should be banned from import, under the assumption it was mined wholly or in part with forced labor or child labor.
Twenty of Florida's 28 representatives, led by Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Republican Mario Díaz-Balart, are calling on the House Ways and Means Committee to reinstate the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, which expired almost three years ago.
As the negotiators push to get agreement on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework in San Francisco, two Senate committee chairmen are arguing that the trade pillar should be jettisoned, or at least delayed until the administration can build support in Congress.
The CBP executive who manages forced labor enforcement said that CBP is working on evaluating "commercially available services that may assist the agency and importers with establishing standardizing programs for origin testing and other types of innovations."
The Southern Shrimp Alliance hailed a recently introduced bipartisan bill that would require cargo imported by air or land to be covered by publicly accessible manifests, just as is cargo that comes over the oceans (see 2311030022).
The New Democrat Coalition, a caucus of pro-free trade Democrats, publicly released a letter to the president asking him to change course on trade, and work on traditional free trade agreements that lower tariffs and go through congressional approval. President Joe Biden has declined to work on any trade-liberalizing FTAs, saying that deals that can be negotiated more quickly that address supply chains, trade facilitation and other non-tariff barriers are more fit for today's challenges.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and the top Republican on the panel, Sen. Mike Crapo, are asking CBP to explain how it uses AI in both trade enforcement and trade facilitation, with detailed questions on where it's used, how it's validated and whether the agency allows importers and exporters to challenge a decision that is based on AI.
NEW YORK -- Importers' service providers said CBP's inconsistency and lack of communication about why supply chain documentation was not enough -- or even was enough -- to prove that there was no connection to Xinjiang are the biggest headaches of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.