Food storage importer Huhtamaki brought a May 8 complaint to the Court of International Trade saying CBP wrongly applied Section 301 duties to its clamshell container imports. Prior to entry, the importer said, it had undertaken “a months-long wild-goose chase” with CBP that ended with verbal confirmation the imports were excluded (Huhtamaki, Inc. v. United States, CIT # 24-00050).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sustained both the Commerce Department's 2018-19 and 2019-20 reviews of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China in a pair of decisions. Judges Richard Taranto, Alvin Schall and Raymond Chen upheld Commerce's surrogate value picks in both reviews.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on May 9 upheld the Court of International Trade's classification of 14 mixtures of frozen fruits and vegetables under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 0811.90.80, the residual category for "other" frozen fruit.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated April 25-28 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
The following lawsuit was filed recently at the Court of International Trade:
On remand, the Commerce Department again chose to directly value xanthan gum exporter Neimenggu Fufeng Biotechnologies’ energy costs for an antidumping duty review. It explained that for the first time in its reviews of the relevant AD order, it was able to break out a surrogate’s costs in a way that let it directly value Fufeng’s energy without fear of double-counting (Neimenggu Fufeng Biotechnologies Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00068).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on May 9 upheld the Court of International Trade's classification of 14 types of frozen fruit mixtures under Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading 0811.90.80, which covers "other" frozen fruit. Judges Todd Hughes, Leonard Stark and Robert Schroeder, sitting by designation from a Texas court, held that nine types of mixtures that contain fruits and vegetables properly fit under heading 0811 pursuant to GRI 3(b), which considers which component of a mixture gives it its "essential character," since the mixtures' fruit gave the product its essential character. The appeals court said subheading 0811.90.80 was proper to cover all 14 mixture types, though it disagreed with the trade court that "other" means "none of the above," writing instead that it means "none of the preceding categories."
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated Apr. 9-25 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):