CBP Pushing for Streamlined Import Requirements as Administration Efforts Continue to Combat Illegal Fishing

BALTIMORE -- CBP is working to ensure that efforts to stem illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and seafood fraud comport with mandates to streamline border processes and don’t impose unreasonable burdens on the trade community, said Jeffrey Nii, director of the agency’s Interagency Collaboration Division, at the East Coast Trade Symposium on Nov. 5.

Launched by a memorandum issued by President Barack Obama in June 2014 (see 14061726), the effort to combat IUU fishing was initially marked by calls to create “robust certification requirements” to ensure that “the supply chain is completely transparent,” and that the government knows “exactly where that fish was caught,” said Nii. CBP pushed back several weeks prior to the memo, garnering inclusion of language requiring the effort coordinate with the February 2014 Executive Order establishing the International Trade Data System and streamlining trade (see 14061726).

The alternative, according to Nii, would be something akin to the Lacey Act’s treatment of wood products, where every piece of wood must be certified to a particular origin. That would have been “very difficult” and “very expensive for the trade, and very challenging for us in law enforcement to enforce, he said. CBP is working hard to ensure “that we don’t have a Lacey Act fishing requirement.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service will soon issue an interim final rule, and CBP is “still arm wrestling with them trying to make sure it's streamlined,” said Nii. The rule will include language saying NMFS is coordinating with the Border Interagency Executive Committee (BIEC) and ITDS. NMFS is “scoping out” requirements for new international fisheries permits, while eliminating all redundant forms, he said.