U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has created a new dashboard that offers interesting insights on the agency’s enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) to date.
The UFLPA establishes that goods made wholly or in part in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are made with forced labor and are therefore excluded from entry into the U.S. It is important to note that even companies who do not imported directly from China may have goods detained if the materials used to produce their goods in a second country are tied at any level to the XUAR or specific entities or commodities associated with forced labor in China.
High priority sectors identified for enforcement include:
Apparel
Cotton and cotton products
Polysilicon-based products (electronics)
Tomatoes and Downstream Products
However, CBP has stated that it uses a dynamic, risk-based approach to enforcement that prioritizes actions against the highest-risk entities based on an ever-changing data and intelligence environment.
Highlights from the CBP dashboard statistics include:
Total number of shipments and value of shipments fell quarter after quarter from 2022 Q4 to 2023 Q2
The industry sector with the most stopped shipments has been electronics, followed by apparel, footwear, and textiles
The countries of origin most affected by the UFLPA are Malaysia, Vietnam & China, with more than half the value of stopped shipments to date coming from Malaysia and the largest number of stopped shipments to date coming from China
For Malaysia, all of the stopped shipments have been in the electronics sector. For Vietnam, 60% have been in electronics, 23.8% have been in apparel, footwear, and textiles, and 16.1% have been in industrial and manufacturing materials. For China, 29.6 percent have been in apparel, footwear, and textiles, 20.9 percent have been in industrial and manufacturing materials, and 16.7 percent have been in agriculture and prepared products.
To learn more: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/trade/uyghur-forced-labor-prevention-act-statistics
Source: U.S. Customs & Border Protection and Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, P.A.