With the flood of imports and ocean traffic North American ports have been experiencing lately, there’s been an inevitable rise in accidents at sea, including events like this month’s oil spill off Southern California and Zim Kingston’s recent container fire. Unfortunately, these relatively minor setbacks are having a greater than normal impact with our logistics networks already stretched to the breakpoint already.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are also now charging an “’emergency fee’ of $100 per container — increasing each day in increments of $100 — for local-delivery containers that remain at the terminals nine days or longer and rail containers for three days or longer,” according to JOC. Long Beach is even going one step further in its attempts to reduce the current pileup of vessels waiting offshore by easing restrictions on storing shipping containers. It is unlikely that these steps will ease the situation.
In a similar move, the state of California just released an executive order calling for state agencies to “identify parcels of land that could be used to store some of the cargo containers backing up San Pedro Bay ports,” according to Supply Chain Dive. Meanwhile, shippers looking to avoid congestion by using alternate gateways may be out of luck as new reports of trucking, rail, and warehouse capacity shortages in these areas start to emerge.
There is also big news regarding tariffs:
The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) will soon begin accepting requests to reinstate certain exclusions to the Section 301, China tariffs. Here are some highlights.
- The USTR will consider submissions addressing only those exclusions that were extended.
- Submissions must be received by Dec. 1, 2021.
- Reinstated exclusions will be retroactive to Oct. 12, 2021; however, according to the attached notice, only to the extent that “…entries are not liquidated at the time the claim to apply the reinstated exclusion is made to [CBP] ….”
- The USTR did not indicate the duration of any reinstated exclusions. Instead, the USTR invited comments on “…the appropriate length of the reinstated exclusion.”
- In deciding whether to reinstate an exclusion, the USTR’s focus will be “whether, despite the imposition of additional duties beginning in September 2018, the particular product remains available only from China.”
- The USTR asks that requesters address the following criteria (copied from the announcements):
To learn more about this week’s top international shipping industry news, check out the following article highlights:
