APHIS, FWS Cite Progress on 2008 Lacey Amendments; Representatives Concerned Declarations Hurting Industry
More resources are needed for federal agencies to fully implement the 2008 amendments to the Lacey Act, though agencies have already focused on educating importers about the new declaration requirements, crafting exclusions, and an creating online database for importers, representatives from Animal Plant and Health Inspection Services and U.S. Fish and Wildlife told a House Subcommittee May 16.
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Members of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife questioned the representatives, sometimes contentiously, about what Chairman John Fleming, R-La., called the “voluminous” declaration requirements of the 2008 Lacey Act amendments, which extended the environmental law to plant products.
APHIS has processed 1.8 million declarations since 2009, said Rebecca Bech, Deputy Administrator, Plant Protection and Quarantine at APHIS, amounting to about 40,000 per month. The agency has phased in the declaration requirements to make things easier for industry; full implementation would create about one million import declarations a month, Bech said. Four phases have been implemented so far, and Bech said the agency will give a six-month notice before implementing any further phases.
The agency is working to ensure the declaration requirements are consistent, manageable for industry and mesh with the environmental protection goals of Lacey, Bech said. There are still a “number of challenges, particularly in regard to the scope of the provisions,” she said. To scale back the number of declarations, APHIS is crafting a final rule defining common food crops and common cultivation, which will be published in the “near future,” Bech said. The rule will exclude about 500,000 imports a month from Lacey declarations, she said. The agency is also using feedback from a June 2011 proposed rule on a de minimis exclusion for some plant-based products, she said.
This summer, APHIS will begin a pilot of its web database with information for importers, with a goal of full implementation in late fall. The database will be “very, very helpful” for importers still filing with paper declarations, Bech said. She also promised the agency would release a Congressional report next week on the feasibility of creating and maintaining a public database of plant control foreign laws, as required in the 2008 amendments.
“Our piece of the response is focused on just the declarations,” Bech said. APHIS has referred some declarations to the Department of Justice and Fish and Wildlife, but to date has done “very limited monitoring,” and instead “focused on educating and providing outreach so people can complete the declaration.” Bech said the outreach has been working, noting that when the declaration requirement was new, it took importers more than one hour to complete. Now it takes 30 minutes, she said.
In its 2014 budget request, APHIS asked for $1.445 million to continue Lacey implementation; a big increase of the $716,000 the agency had for Lacey in 2013. “[We’ve] had very limited resources,” Bech said. The additional funding will allow the agency to add staff, enhance databases and look at increasing outreach and education.
Congress must ensure agencies tasked with implementing Lacey “have the resources they need to do so,” said Fish and Wildlife Deputy Director Stephen Guertin. The number of wildlife law enforcement officers there has remained the same since the 70s, even as the global illicit wildlife trade has grown. The agency was also unable to hire a new class of enforcement officers in 2013, due to sequestration, Guertin said.
Fish and Wildlife works on almost 13,000 law enforcement cases each year, of which almost 2,500 are for violations of the Lacey Act, Guertin said. They have provided CBP and the Justice Department with about 3,000 import declarations in support of investigations since the 2008 amendments, he said. Three wood-related investigations are currently ongoing, all involving “commercial exploitation overseas” of paper or timber products, he said. He declined to provide any additional information about the investigations.
In his opening statement, Fleming said the Committee wanted to examine whether the Lacey amendments had their intended effect “What is the benefit of having U.S. importers and small businesses fill out, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars,” extensive import declarations, he said. Other committee members questioned the point of such declarations when so few had actually fueled Justice investigations, and whether an “on-demand” system would be better.
Bech said many in the industry feel like there are a lot of challenges in complying with Lacey, as well as industry members who support the law. APHIS has “tried to address the concerns and the challenges,” she said, and is working within the framework of the law to do so. Both she and Guertin said, when questioned by Fleming, that they thought no additional changes to Lacey were needed.
See future issues of ITT for more on this hearing.