The Commerce Department set the 12-month 2024 value-added tariff preference level for certain apparel imported directly from Haiti eligible to receive duty-free treatment under the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity Through Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE). For the one-year period Dec. 20, 2024, through Dec. 19, 2025, the recalculated quantity of imports eligible for preferential treatment under the value-added TPL is 322,927,229 square meters equivalent (SME). Apparel articles entered in excess of this TPL will be subject to otherwise applicable duty rates.
African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)
The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) allows duty-free importation of goods from designated sub-Saharan African countries. The program was authorized in 2000 and is intended to promote good governance through economic development and access to free markets. It will expire in September 2025, and it remains uncertain whether Congress will reauthorize it.
A five-year renewal of the Haiti HELP/HOPE trade preferences is the only tariff liberalization legislation that was attached to the federal spending bill that will keep the federal government open through mid-March.
Congress has not yet finished the text of the government spending bill that needs to pass this week, but House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Adrian Smith, R-Neb., said in the early afternoon that several trade provisions he had hoped would hitch a ride weren't included. He said his understanding was that the African Growth and Opportunity Act wouldn't be attached, nor would the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program.
Congress will pass a spending bill before leaving next week, and while everyone wants to attach their legislation to it, the prospect for Haitian trade preferences to get a ride seems relatively strong.
House Ways and Means Committee member Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., said that there will be a renewed bipartisan effort to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act next year. He called AGOA "something that is very beneficial to our U.S. trade policy." But LaHood left the door open to phasing out or changing the third-party fabric provision of AGOA in the 2025 reauthorization.
More than 30 organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, asked House and Senate leadership to hold a vote on the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program during the lame duck session next month.
Although some trade attorneys have been worrying that a Trump administration will discourage a Republican Congress from bringing back Generalized System of Preferences program tariff breaks for developing countries, members of the House Ways and Means Committee did not endorse that point of view.
NEW YORK -- Tyler Beckelman, a Commerce deputy assistant secretary who also sits on the interagency Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force, told a garment industry audience that the Biden administration still intends to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking on de minimis "before we all turn into pumpkins on Jan. 20."
The agendas of both major presidential candidates would provide few incentives for other countries to negotiate new trade agreements with the U.S., a former Commerce Department official said Oct. 31.
Because China makes 90% of anode and cathode materials, and dominates processing of critical minerals, no matter where they are mined, recent hikes in tariffs on Chinese minerals will do little, trade experts agreed.