Brussels, 26/06/2008 (Agence Europe) - Could this be a crack in the USA's desire to impose 100% scanning from July 2012 of maritime cargo containers heading for US ports prior to loading at their port of origin? Visiting Brussels for the General Policy Commission of the World Customs Organisation (WCO), Jayson Ahern, the deputy commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection, admitted that the 100% scanning law, if applied across the board, might not completely achieve the desired level of security, and could disrupt the global logistics chain at a high price to American consumers (see EUROPE 9680). Global 100% scanning was pointless, he said: “100% scanning does not equal 100% security”, he told a group of journalists. “We believe strongly that those costs would be added to the supply chain” and, at the end of the day, the cost would be passed on to the final consumer, he added.
At the beginning of June Mr Ahern presented the US Congress with the preliminary results of the pilot projects conducted since October 2007 in seven medium-sized international ports (principally Port Qasim in Pakistan, Puerto Cortes in Honduras and Southampton in the UK) to test on a large scale the feasibility of the US law. These projects demonstrate that 100% scanning of containers is possible on a relatively limited scale. However, the costs of extending this to the entire global supply chain would be extremely high for the US administration, with the pilot projects alone already having cost $60 million for the first six months. Alongside the investment in infrastructure and technology, training customs officers to interpret the images provided by the scanners would be costly.
Given its limited resources, the US administration therefore plans to focus its action on the highest-risk shipping routes. Mr Ahern has borrowed an approach based on risk assessment which has long been advocated by the WCO and the European Union, consisting of examining around 3% of containers in circulation based on carefully defined criteria. “How should we assess the highest-risk shipping routes?”, Mr Ahern wondered: using criteria linked to both the location of the ports and the nature of the goods being transported, he said. (M.B. /transl.fl)