The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, joined by 30 other trade groups, told the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees' leadership that they oppose the Level the Playing Field Act 2.0, which would rewrite antidumping and countervailing duty laws to favor domestic interests.

Sayari, a firm that sells risk intelligence to companies with international trade compliance needs, demonstrated how its ability to find and analyze data can help an importer of laminates, flooring or timber evaluate the risk that the wood was harvested illegally in Brazil.

CBP violated importer Royal Brush Manufacturing's due process rights by failing to provide it access to business confidential information (BCI) in an antidumping and countervailing duty evasion proceeding, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a highly anticipated opinion on July 27.

Apple juice concentrate from China and avocados, tomatoes and peppers from Mexico are among the imported foods identified as carrying the highest risk for forced labor in their supply chains, according to an academic study published July 24 in the online journal Nature Food, an offshoot of the journal Nature.

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.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Lear Co., a multinational auto parts supplier, to defend its leather supply chain from Brazil, and, in a footnote in the letter, cited a Reuters story that said 1,324 workers had been rescued from slavery-like conditions while cutting down forests in Brazil from 1995 to 2021. However, that article also said Brazil defines slave labor as not just forced labor -- where workers are not free to leave jobs -- but also working in degrading work conditions, or working such long hours that it's a health risk.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department is responsible for three of the four pillars in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, told a think tank audience that she is "determined to finalize agreements with all of these countries on all three pillars I’m managing" by a summit at the end of November. The IPEF, which does not liberalize tariffs but does seek to lower non-tariff barriers in its trade pillar, also includes a tax and anti-corruption pillar, an infrastructure and decarbonization pillar, and a supply chain pillar, which was already agreed to earlier this year.

Africa is a good location for producing labor-intensive apparel, The Children's Place's former chief supply chain and sourcing officer told an interagency committee tasked with considering countries' eligibility for the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The committee, chaired by Jeremy Streatfeild, director of African Affairs at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, held an online public hearing on AGOA July 24.

Approximately $32 million in Section 232 duties on steel or aluminum should have been paid between March 2018 and Nov. 10, 2021, but weren't because of data errors in the transmissions between the Bureau of Industry and Security and CBP, or because CBP had not caught up to the fact that the exclusion had been filled. According to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office, more than 90% of the unpaid duties were due to CBP not realizing that exclusion volumes for a particular product and firm had been surpassed at the time of the entry, and the agency did not realize that fact until after the 90-day reliquidation period.

The government correctly classified counterweights for mini-excavators as "backhoe" parts, rendering them ineligible for a Section 301 tariff exclusion, CIT Judge Jane Restani ruled in a July 21 opinion.