Dylan Tokar of The Wall Street Journal tells his readers that U.S. Customs is using advanced isotopic testing at Georgia’s Port of Savannah to enforce new trade regulations, including bans on goods made with forced labor in China. Inspectors screen a small fraction of the 2.5 million annual containers, focusing on complex issues like textiles from Xinjiang, China, to address growing supply chain challenges. Tokar writes:
On a breezy fall day at the seaport in Savannah, Ga., U.S. Customs and Border Protection Watch Commander James Long stands in a cavernous warehouse looking over rows and rows of cardboard boxes unpacked from cargo containers and laid out across a concrete floor.
The boxes, some neatly packed and others bound with tape and bursting at the seams, contain everything from electric scooters to clothing and lamps. Long and his team must sift through them, looking for items that don’t meet U.S. product safety standards or that violate intellectual property laws. Other field operations teams screen agricultural products and search for drugs, guns and other contraband.
“We call it looking for the bugs and the thugs,” says Long. […]
When they reach Savannah, the first stop for the boxes is a giant X-ray machine.
In 2021, U.S. lawmakers passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The law bans goods from the Xinjiang region of China on the presumption they were produced with forced labor by a Muslim minority group known as the Uyghurs.
CBP plans to use the new equipment at its Savannah lab to help identify whether any imported garments are made with cotton produced in Xinjiang. The region in western China grows about 20% of the world’s cotton. […]
Read more here.
