Supply chain reviews across a multitude of products, all published one year after the executive order on supply chain vulnerabilities, say that concentration in certain countries, especially China, creates both forced labor and trade war vulnerabilities.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Arent Fox lawyers said a disclosure bill aimed at large fashion retailers and manufacturers may not pass in the New York statehouse, but it's making lots of people in the industry nervous (see 2201200046). "Even if this bill doesn't pass, there's going to be others in the future," Angela Santos said.
The two top issues Thomas Overacker, CBP's executive director of cargo and conveyance security, has been dealing with are the blockades at the Canadian border and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. He told an audience at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones' legislative conference that CBP is going to have a challenge identifying what goods come from the Xinjiang region, given the number of middle men in China, issuing invoices or acting as freight forwarders. "It’s not always evident from the data we collect at CBP … where the goods were actually produced," he said Feb. 15.
A bipartisan bill that would require businesses with more than $500 million in gross annual receipts to conduct annual audits to investigate whether there is forced labor among their suppliers or secondary suppliers has been introduced again. Ted Murphy, a trade lawyer at Sidley Austin, wrote that while the Slave-Free Business Certification Act of 2022 has bipartisan sponsorship, from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., "it is not clear whether this bill has much chance of becoming law (a previous version of the bill was introduced in 2020, but did not advance out of committee)."
A U.S. solar panel manufacturer on Feb. 8 filed another request for an anti-circumvention inquiry on solar cells from third countries made from Chinese inputs, including polysilicon wafers and ingots. Auxin Solar says solar cell imports from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia are circumventing the antidumping duty and countervailing duty orders on crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China (A-570-979/C-570-980), in a request filed months after a similar petition from a group of anonymous solar producers was rejected by the Commerce Department.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The tariff on most imported solar panels will drop to 14.75% at 12:01 a.m. on Feb. 7, and bifacial solar panels will continue to be exempt from the global safeguard, a presidential proclamation Feb. 4 says. The tariff rate quota threshold for solar cells will also double from 2.5 GW to 5 GW, making it unlikely any imported cells will be subject to the tariff.
Members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China are asking appropriators in the House and Senate to dedicate more than the $9 million or $10 million currently slated to strengthen CBP enforcement of the ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. "Given the subsequent enactment of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the request by the Biden Administration for additional resources to implement it, we respectfully request that the conference report on the FY2022 bill include an even greater amount for forced labor enforcement," they wrote Feb. 2. Congress has not yet passed bills to fund the government for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, 2021, but appropriators are trying to reach agreement by Feb. 18 on the rest of the fiscal year's funding levels.
Panelists at a Washington International Trade Association conference Feb. 2 said they're not sure when the supply chain crisis will ease, noting the U.S. brought a record number of containers into the country last year. Jonathan Gold, the National Retail Federation's vice president for supply chains, said he expects the amount to be even higher in 2022.