U.S. PUBLIC PORTS WELCOME MUCH NEEDED SECURITY FUNDS

DHS Announces Nearly $142 Million In Awards To 36 Port Areas

ALEXANDRIA, VA  (September 13, 2005) – The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), the organization representing public ports throughout the Western Hemisphere, welcomes the announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that it will provide $141.97 million in federal grants to help 36 U.S. port areas address physical security enhancements at their facilities.

The majority of this round’s grant funds went to the public sector, including seaports.  According to a DHS press release, matching funds from the private sector totaled $33 million, leaving a projected 77 percent of the grant monies for public facilities.

Funds are also being provided through this program for U.S.-inspected passenger vessels and ferries.  This year, the Port Security Grant program’s focus was on what DHS determined to be the highest risk ports, with a priority on addressing threats from explosives and non-conventional threats that would cause major disruption to commerce and significant loss of life.  Only 66 port areas were deemed “eligible” to apply for this round, leaving many ports to fend for themselves. 

Hurricane Katrina has helped bring the nation’s attention to the critical role that seaports play in handling trade, ranging from imported oil, coffee and steel, to exports of corn, soybeans and wheat.  Communities and ports are now working with responsive agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard, Maritime Administration, Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to quickly get affected waterways and marine facilities operational again.  While Katrina was a natural disaster, the Port Security Grant program helps seaports prevent and respond to catastrophic terrorist events which could cause similar or greater damage and possibly close targeted ports long-term.

According to DHS, funds will be held in reserve for ports impacted by Katrina until proposed security projects are ready to be implemented.

This is the fifth time that DHS has released port security grant funds since initiating the program after Sept. 11, 2001.  Including this most recent announcement, DHS has given port facilities and vessels approximately $707 million in security grants, including $75 million from DHS’ Urban Area Security Initiative program.  However, according to AAPA President/CEO Kurt Nagle, the need is much greater.

“DHS limited this latest round of grants to only 66 seaports.  Even though this is a smaller group of eligible ports than in previous rounds, less than one-third of the dollar amount they requested was awarded,” said Nagle.  “Sixty-nine percent of what eligible ports said they need to safeguard their facilities couldn't be awarded because the program is so underfunded.”

Nagle is also critical of the way DHS narrowed port eligibility in this latest round of security grants.  He said terrorists might view the list of ineligible ports as potentially easier targets than those eligible for grant money.  “We need to avoid even the perception that there’s a soft underbelly of underprotected ports that could make our country more vulnerable to terrorism.”

To better protect ports against acts of terror, AAPA has called for a funding level of $400 million a year to harden security at all seaports that need to comply with the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA).  Congress is currently debating the final agreement on the Fiscal Year 2006 Department of Homeland Security budget, which will provide funds for the Port Security Grant program’s sixth round.  AAPA is urging Congress to support the Senate’s appropriation recommendation of $200 million, rather than the House’s recommendation of $150 million. 

The American Association of Port Authorities was founded in 1912 and today represents 150 of the leading public port authorities in the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, the Association represents 300 sustaining and associate members, firms and individuals with an interest in the seaports of the Western Hemisphere. AAPA port members are public entities mandated by law to serve public purposes. Port authorities facilitate waterborne commerce and contribute to local, regional and national economic growth.

COPYRIGHT © 2005, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PORT AUTHORITIES

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October 27, 2005
The U.S. State Department issued its final rules today specifying its plans to issue electronic passports (e-passports) containing RFID tags.

The department says it intends to begin its e-passport program in December. The first stage will be a pilot program in which e-passports will be issued to government employees using official or diplomatic passports for government travel. This pilot, the department says, will permit field-testing prior to the first issuance to the American traveling public, early next year. By October 2006, all U.S. passports, with the exception of a small number of emergency passports issued by U.S. embassies or consulates, will contain RFID tags.

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At Wesccon: Importers urged to use Customs accounts
24 Oct 2005, JOC Online

MONTEREY, Calif. - Importers and brokers are being urged to drop their traditional practice of dealing with Customs on a transaction-by-transaction basis and instead to establish personal accounts with Customs and Border Security.

Through Customs' automated framework for the trade community, known as the Automated Commercial Environment, or ACE, importers and brokers can sign up for a Customs Portal Account and receive a monthly report on their transactions, similar to a standard credit-card arrangement for consumers.

When establishing an account, importers and brokers are assigned a Customs contact to act as account manager and assist the companies in dealing with the agency. The account also provides access to their transaction record during the previous month, as well as Customs reports.

The accounts help both the trade community and Customs to streamline their operations so each import entry is not treated as a single event. "You need to sign up for a portal account tomorrow," Art Litman, vice president of FedEx Trade Networks, told Wesccon, the annual cargo conference of brokers and freight forwarders, over the weekend.

Approximately 400 importers, 220 brokers and 200 carriers out of thousands of importers have signed the necessary terms and conditions and gone through the vetting process to establish accounts.

At the same time, smaller importers who may not want to establish a Customs portal account will have the option to establish a non-portal account under ACE, said Lou Samenfink, executive director of Customs' cargo systems program office.

While non-portal accounts cannot access Customs reports, importers can still get periodic monthly statements of their accounts. These importers can also hire brokers with established portal accounts to access reports and other information on their behalf.

ACE, the $3.3 billion automated environment that has been under development since the mid-1990s, will not be fully developed until 2009. However, in 2007 ACE will hit a milestone when Customs rolls out the Entry Summary, Accounts and Revenue module that will truly separate the payment of duties from the process of filing the entry document.

Litman said programs such as ESAR are valuable for the trade community and demonstrate that ACE involves a change in business practices rather than simply the development of a new computer system.

"It's not just an opportunity for new automation. It's an opportunity for real change," he said.

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Customs plans CSI, C-TPAT expansion
24 Oct 2005, JOC Online

Agency will also hire 1,000 more border agents

MONTEREY, Calif. - The budget for Customs and Border Patrol has been bumped up by 11.5 percent for fiscal 2006, and will help expand programs to improve container and supply-chain security, a senior agency official said.

The $7 billion budget, which took effect Oct. 1, will give Customs the resources it needs to hire more border agents and expand successful programs such as the Container Security Initiative and the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, said Deborah Spero, Customs deputy commissioner.

The security programs will be further strengthened in the coming year as Customs accesses information deeper in the supply chain.

"We need thorough, relevant data as early as possible in the supply chain," Spero told Wesccon, the annual Western Cargo Conference of freight forwarders and customs brokers.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Customs became part of the Department of Homeland Security, and Congress has been more generous in appropriating money to fight terrorism.

The 2006 budget will allow Customs to hire 1,000 more border agents and 250 support personnel. This is in addition to the 500 border agents that were hired last summer, Spero said.

Customs will also expand CSI, which puts U.S. inspectors on the ground at foreign ports to intercept suspicious shipments before they are loaded on U.S.-bound vessels. Customs will also receive money to expand its national targeting system headquartered in suburban Washington.

The budget includes $125 million for additional drive-through monitors used to detect radiation in containers at U.S. ports. When those are purchased, Customs will have obtained all of the radiation portal monitors it set out to acquire for the program, Spero said.

Of all its security efforts, obtaining advance shipment information is probably the most important -- the "soul" of the agency's enforcement efforts, according to Spero.

Customs will receive valuable assistance in this area as the World Customs Organization recently adopted a strategic framework for cargo security that will help to standardize the data customs services around the world need to prevent transportation networks from falling prey to terrorists.

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M. E. Dey & Company is pleased to introduce the following new staff members, offering our customers a diverse range of import and export experience

Diane Eckert, Logistics Coordinator, is a specialist in ocean imports and has worked in both Milwaukee and Chicago in other freight forwarding offices. She joins M.E. Dey after moving to Milwaukee in May 2005.

Jane Meyer, Project Manager, has been in the logistics business for over 15 years, handling solutions from brokerage (Canadian/US/Mexican), warehousing, distribution and trucking logistics to international air in both Canada and the USA. She has experience moving a wide variety of products. "I really enjoy working in the industry due to the interesting companies, people and products you get to work with each and every day."

Ann Renteria, Import Specialist, is  relatively new to the industry but has worked in Import/Export Documentation, Order Entry, Accounting, and as an Administrative Assistant.

Jeri Lynn Strasser, Export Coordinator, worked at Miller Brewing Company exporting to the Caribbean, Mexico and South America as well as industry experience doing outside sales.

Carol Czeczka, Import Specialist, has been in the freight forwarding business about 17 years, primarily in export. She has experience in NAFTA and Hazardous freight shipping and has worked for several trucking companies in logistics. "Moving oversize freight is one of the things I love to do."

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Amazing Engineering Feats  click images for larger view

Because water transportation is so crucial to the movement of worldwide freight, here are some amazing and clever engineering solutions.

A kilometer-long "concrete bathtub" water bridge over the Elbe River in Germany that joins the Elbe-Havel canal to the Mittelland canal near the eastern town of Magdeburg

Taking six years to build and costing around half a billion euros, the massive undertaking connects Berlin's inland harbor with the ports along the Rhine river. Europe's longest water bridge is just shy of a kilometer at 918 meters. The huge tub to transport ships over the Elbe took 24,000 metric tons of steel and 68,000 cubic meters of concrete to build.

The water bridge enables river barges to avoid a lengthy and sometimes unreliable passage along the Elbe. Shipping can often come to a halt on the stretch if the river's water mark falls to unacceptably low levels.

The Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel (MMMBT), a 4.6-mile long combination bridge-tunnel system  connecting two Virginia communities across the mouth of the James River.

The MMMBT opened in April 1992 after seven years of construction and a total cost of about $400 million. (Fabricating the tunnel portion of the bridge and lowering it into place cost $126 million alone.)

The tunnel is 4,800 feet long from portal to portal, and it was built by the immersed sunken tube method. The traffic lanes in the tunnel are 13 feet wide with 16.5 feet of vertical clearance. The shipping channel has 800 feet of horizontal width and 45 feet of vertical depth and the tunnel was designed and built deep enough to allow for a future enlargement of the shipping channel to 1,000 feet of horizontal width and 55 feet of vertical depth below the average low-tide water level.

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Textile Imports
20 Oct 2005, ShanghaiDaily.com

Chinese textile and apparel exports are expected to account for more than half of total U.S. imports in 2008, up from the current 30 per cent, as quotas were phased out, experts said at the Shanghai International Industry Fair.

Made-in-China products accounted for 16 per cent of total U.S. apparel imports previous to 2005, they said. Textile and apparel shipments from China and India are expected to account for two-thirds of U.S. imports by 2008.

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Trade Talks Update: China; Pakistan
18 Oct 2005, ST&R
US Backs Off on China Currency Issue

Statements made by Treasury Secretary John Snow after meeting recently with Chinese officials indicate that the Bush Administration is not likely to name China as a currency manipulator in an upcoming report and is trying to re-frame the domestic debate over the issue in order to mitigate the likely negative reaction from Congress. “Moving to a truly flexible exchange rate requires a lot of preparatory steps,” Snow said Monday. “China is seriously engaged in taking these preparatory steps.” Those remarks contrast sharply to those Snow made last spring, when he insisted that China is “ready now to adopt a more flexible exchange rate.” During his trip, Snow called for Chinese reforms on a wide range of financial issues besides currency policy, a move that the Associated Press opined is designed to allow the White House to show Congress that it is making progress on more important bilateral issues and thus head off threats to advance legislation that would impose currency-related sanctions on the United States’ second-largest trading partner. 

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Pakistan Expected to Ask US to Lower Trade Barriers

In the wake of a massive earthquake, Pakistan is expected to soon ask the US to lower barriers to imports of Pakistani goods, particularly textiles and apparel, which make up about 60% of the country’s exports. It is unclear what action Washington will take on the request. On the one hand, there will likely be substantial opposition from the domestic industry, which can point to the fact that the main textile-producing regions of Pakistan sustained little damage from the earthquake. On the other hand, one corporate intelligence service said, “the political reality of the region,” including its relevance to the US war on terror and its centrality in longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan, could prompt the US to consider the request more seriously than it otherwise might.

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Bugs incident won't derail China jet purchases:

BOEING Co's efforts to sell aircraft in China probably won't suffer from the reported discovery of spying devices on a 767 jetliner built as President Jiang Zemin's official jet, a Chinese aviation official said

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Importers warned on China curb schemes
24 Oct 2005, JOC Online

MONTEREY, Calif. -- U.S. importers trying to work around China import curbs have been warned: make sure your paperwork is in order.

Tactics such as shifting production of part of the garment to a non-quota country or changing the fabric can be legal, but importers and brokers must make sure all such claims are accompanied by supporting documentation.

"You're only as good as the paper you have," Richard Wortman, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Grunfield, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman and Klestadt, told Wesccon, the annual conference of West Coast customs brokers and forwarders.

The domestic apparel and textile industry successfully pushed for import limits when the U.S. market was flooded with Chinese goods earlier this year after global quotas were eliminated.

The safeguards will expire at the end of 2008 but until then, Chinese exporters and U.S. importers are expected to engage in various schemes to maintain a vigorous trade in textiles -- some legal and some not.

Wortman cited a recent report by a Beijing newspaper that quoted a Chinese manufacturer as saying it was time to resort to transshipments, an illegal practice where garments made in one country are shipped through a second country, where a phony label of origin is attached.

However, it could be legal to shift a portion of the production of garments to other countries in order to confer country of origin status. Also, it could be legal to change the fabric of certain products that are restricted by safeguards and still be able to manufacture the textile products in China.

The imposition of new safeguards has resulted in a number of violations of U.S. trade laws as importers or their brokers changed the product classification or country of origin code in an attempt to beat the quotas, said Janet Labuda, director of textile enforcement at the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.

Fines for such violations are stiff, and much higher than what a broker earns for filing the entry documentation, she said.

Errors involving classification or valuation of merchandise are quite common because the regulations are so complex. But the parties are still liable for unintentional mistakes.

For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been in effect for 10 years, but more than 50 percent of the documents claiming NAFTA preference contain errors, Labuda said.

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World Holiday Office Closings

Philippines  October  31, 2005 - Special Non Working Holiday
                       November 01, 2005 - All Souls Day
                       November 04, 2005 - Ramadan

Cambodia   October 29, 31, 2005 - Celebration of New King Coronation Anniversary
                                                         & King's Birthday

Japan           November 3rd, 2005 - National Holiday Culture Day

U P C O M I N G   E V E N T S

November 16, 2005
"An All-Day Look at Doing Business in India" & Silent Auction" 

Robert Gardenier – President, M.E. Dey & Company

Anand Desai – Managing Partner, DSK Legal of Mumbai

Asha Nath – Managing Director, Asha Nath Ltd.

Dr. Pradeep Rohatgi – Distinguished Professor, UW-Milwaukee

Lou Janowski – Wisconsin Department of Commerce

Seema Kapani – Diversity Education Professor, UW-Whitewater

Subhash Lananju – Vice President & CIO, Johnson Controls

Wayne Ramus – Vice President, Global Funding Operations, GE Healthcare

Allan Klotsche – Vice President, The Brady Company

FESTA HALL (FORMAL PROGRAM: 9:00 A.M.–4:00 P.M.)

8:30–9:00 a.m. – Registration/Refreshments/Visit and bid at silent auction

9:00–Noon – Welcome/Nomination of ICE Officers/Full-day workshop

Noon–1:30 p.m. – Indian-themed lunch & opportunity to bid on auction items

1:30–4:00 p.m. – Continuation of program on India

4:00–4:15 p.m. – Final bids and presentation of winning bids

4:00–6:00 p.m. – Reception to honor and celebrate Lou Janowskis retirement

For Information and to register go to:

ICE - International Credit Executives Group

or

MWTA - Milwaukee World Trade Association

Jon Bielefeld, Vice President and General Manager of DexM Corporation, headquartered in Waukesha Wisconsin.

Gov. Jim Doyle's Trade Mission To Central Europe

Czech Republic and Poland
November 8-16, 2005

http://www.commerce.state.wi.us/IE/IE-CentralEuropeMission.html