Todd Owen, former executive assistant CBP commissioner who worked in the Office of Field Operations before retiring, said during a March 3 webinar that the trade community should expect to see a lot more traditional customs work over the next few years, such as missed descriptions, undervaluation, duty evasion and import safety. Owen, who is a senior trade adviser at Diaz Trade Law, also said during the webinar that he thinks stopping goods made with forced labor is going to continue to be a priority for the Biden administration. “I don’t see this going away,” he said.

International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from Feb. 22-26 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

Two and a half years after the first Section 301 tariffs went on what ultimately covered the vast majority of imports from China, most of the public lobbying is about renewing exclusions, or offering another round of exclusion applications to be submitted. Lawyers and advocates differ on how they think lobbying will develop over the course of 2021, as President Joe Biden gets his trade team in place. Dan Ujczo, senior counsel at Thompson Hine, said he thinks the focus on exclusions is because businesses have gotten the message on 301s from the administration, which he described as: “brace for these to be around. These aren’t going away anytime soon.”

First sale treatment may not be applicable to transactions involving non-market economies, including China, Court of International Trade Senior Judge Thomas Aquilino said in a March 1 decision. In a ruling on cookware imported by Meyer from Thailand and China through a Chinese middleman, the trade court found the involvement of Chinese companies made it difficult to determine whether the transaction was at arm's length and undistorted by non-market influences, as required for first sale valuation. Though he stopped short of saying imports originating in non-market economies could never receive first sale valuation, he called on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to clarify.

The Biden administration is emphasizing the need to fight forced labor and exploitative labor conditions, as well as using trade to fight climate change, in the first Trade Agenda published since President Joe Biden took office.

Across dozens of pages of written answers to Senate Finance Committee members, U.S. trade representative nominee Katherine Tai often avoided directly answering questions, instead pledging to work with senators on their priorities. One of the most common questions posed to Tai was whether she would renew Section 301 exclusions that expired last year; as well, whether she would allow companies that were denied exclusions another chance at a request; and whether she would reopen the exclusion process.

The issuance of CBP withhold release orders is not always seen as helpful in other parts of the federal government, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released on March 1. The full report includes some criticism from within the government as being too heavy-handed at times. “For example, although State [Department] officials considered WROs to be helpful in raising awareness of forced labor issues, State officials also said that the issuance of WROs can be a 'sledgehammer-type' approach that may make it more difficult for other agencies, such as State and [the Department of Labor], to implement more collaborative or remediation-focused approaches to eliminate and prevent forced labor,” it said.

The House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee chairman, along with two members of the former NAFTA working group, lent their voices to a letter asking the administration to drop its opposition to a TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property waiver, requested by India and South Africa, would temporarily end patent protections for new vaccines and diagnostic tests used against COVID-19. Countries are already allowed to do compulsory licenses in the case of emergencies, but only after negotiations on compensating the company for the right to manufacture the drug failed.

Mesh Wi-Fi network extenders perform a different function than routers or switches and should be classified in a separate subheading, CBP said in a recently released ruling dated Dec. 18, 2020. The ruling is the result of an application for further review of protest submitted by Calix over an entry of mesh network extenders, which was liquidated in subheading 8517.62.0020. The classification issue is “whether or not the protested merchandise is 'switching and routing apparatus' of subheading 8517.62.0020, [Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUSA)], or 'other' of subheading 8517.62.0090,” CBP said.

The maritime shipping industry is struggling to find a short-term solution to the unprecedented congestion occurring at U.S. ports, which continues to impose large costs on traders and further clog the global supply chain, industry representatives said. Although work is being done by the Federal Maritime Commission and Congress to provide relief, they said many of those efforts will do little to ease port issues in the near future.