The State Department is encouraging importers to join legally binding agreements with labor unions that include mechanisms for workers and employers to ensure labor standards are being met and resolve labor disputes, preventing forced labor indicators in the supply chain, a State Department official said at a CBP event on forced labor on March 14.
Shipments of electronics comprised half the number and nearly 90% of the value of all shipments stopped under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act since enforcement began in the third quarter of 2022, according to data released by CBP as part of its UFLPA “Dashboard,” which debuted March 14. The bulk of those shipments were of solar products, CBP officials said at a press conference that day.
CBP released a new frequently asked questions document on the upcoming Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Region Alert in ACE, set for deployment on March 18 (see 2212210041). Once it's in effect, “if no postal code is transmitted when it is flagged by the system as a required field, the record will remain in reject status and will not be accepted in the Cargo Release system,” CBP said in the FAQ. If an incorrect postal code is submitted, filers may transmit a replacement “R” or “C” record prior to the shipment’s arrival, the agency said. Importers should enter the street-level, rather than the city-level postal code, unless there is no postal code available for the specific street, CBP said.
CBP issued the following releases on commercial trade and related matters:
CBP's Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) will next meet March 29 in Seattle, CBP said in a notice. Comments are due in writing by March 24.
A U.S. delegation met with Mauritanian civil society leaders, international organizations and Mauritanian government officials to talk about the challenges to ending hereditary slavery and other forced labor issues in the country, but also heard about "notable progress" in addressing the problem. The Labor Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the State and Justice departments met with Mauritanian officials last week, a readout said. Mauritania was removed from the African Growth and Opportunity Act in 2019 over the issue.
China's military ambitions, its role in the fentanyl crisis and Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland all got attention during the first hearing of the Select Committee on China -- but trade, and China's distortions of the global market, were the focus of both Democrats' and Republicans' questions to witnesses from the Trump administration and the head of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
Though CBP's issuance of withhold release orders and forced labor findings has slowed recently as the agency focuses on implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the agency will continue to use its traditional tools to combat forced labor, aided by recent increases in funding for forced labor enforcement, Jessica Rifkin, a customs lawyer with Benjamin England & Associates, said during a webinar Feb. 28.
The new Republican majority in the House Ways and Means Committee said it plans to do oversight across a multitude of trade policies advanced by the administration, including enforcement of trade agreements and trade negotiations for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade and the U.S.-Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership. For existing FTAs, the committee said it wishes to identify provisions that should be updated to improve the agreements' benefits for the U.S.
CBP’s recently issued guidance on Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act enforcement (see 2302230042) provides “much needed clarity” around UFLPA applicability review submissions, and marks an attempt by the agency to “create structure for a process that has quickly buried both importer and agency under burdens of unfathomable intricacy and complexity,” customs lawyer John Foote said in a Feb 24 blog post.