Trade groups that have been active in pushing for different intellectual property approaches in India have formed a new coalition called the Alliance for Trade Enforcement, they announced May 13. Brian Pomper, a former Senate Finance Committee chief trade counsel, is the AFTE executive director. The group includes manufacturing trade groups, pharmaceutical interests, software and telecom interests, and the National Foreign Trade Council and U.S. Council for International Business. They noted that the Special 301 Report recently released by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative identified 33 countries that don't adequately protect IP rights, and said “many of those countries are repeat offenders.” Pomper said AFTE will work with the administration and Congress to dismantle trade barriers such as high tariffs, complex and opaque taxes targeting imports, and laws that do not give intellectual property the protection that USTR says is proper.

CBP has assessed about $62 billion in duties under the major trade remedies started during the Trump administration as of May 13, according to CBP's trade statistics page. That includes $51.4 billion in duties from the Section 301 tariffs on goods from China, and $486.1 million in Section 301 tariffs on goods from the European Union. CBP also has assessed about $7 billion under the Section 232 tariffs on steel and $2.1 billion under tariffs on aluminum. The Section 201 trade remedies on washing machines, washing machine parts and solar cells account for $1.7 billion in assessed tariffs. CBP's statistics account for refunds provided to importers.

CBP added on May 14 the ability in ACE for importers to file entries with recently excluded goods in the third tranche of Section 301 tariffs, it said in a CSMS message. The official Office of the U.S. Trade Representative notice for the exclusions was published on May 8 (see 2005050037). The exclusions are in subheading 9903.88.46. The exclusions are available for any product that meets the description in the Annex to USTR’s notice, regardless of whether the importer filed an exclusion request. The product exclusions apply retroactively to Sept. 24, 2018, and will expire after Aug. 7, 2020. The CSMS message also includes a summary of Section 301 duties that shows information on each tranche of tariffs and granted product exclusions.

Trade groups that have been active in pushing for different intellectual property approaches in India have formed a new coalition called the Alliance for Trade Enforcement, they announced May 13. Brian Pomper, a former Senate Finance Committee chief trade counsel, is the AFTE executive director. The group includes manufacturing trade groups, pharmaceutical interests, software and telecom interests, and the National Foreign Trade Council and U.S. Council for International Business. They noted that the Special 301 Report recently released by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative identified 33 countries that don't adequately protect IP rights, and said “many of those countries are repeat offenders.” Pomper said AFTE will work with the administration and Congress to dismantle trade barriers such as high tariffs, complex and opaque taxes targeting imports, and laws that do not give intellectual property the protection that USTR says is proper.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will grant extensions to 13 exclusions from the first list of Section 301 tariffs on China that were due to expire May 14, it said in a pre-publication copy of a notice posted to its website. The exclusions that weren't extended will expire May 14.

Q1 TV imports to the U.S. from all countries declined 13.8% from a year earlier to 7.93 million sets, said Census Bureau data accessed Saturday through the International Trade Commission’s DataWeb tool. March TV imports of 2.2 million were 17.6% fewer sets than in February and 10.7% below the March 2019 volume. The unmistakable skew in Q1 was toward larger-screen TVs. Q1 imports of the largest sets, classified under the 8528.72.64.60 tariff code for screen sizes exceeding 44.5 inches, declined 2.8% in Q1 to 4.65 million, compared with the 13.8% decline for all sets imported. Q1 imports of the largest-screen 8528.72.64.60 goods were 58.6% of all TV imports, compared with only 52% in the same 2019 quarter. Mexico increasingly became the country of origin for U.S. TV imports, especially in the largest screen sizes. U.S. importers sourced 67.4% of their TVs in Mexico in Q1, compared with 37.7% in the 2019 quarter, when Section 301 tariffs weren’t yet in play on Chinese TV imports. Mexico was the source of 77.8% of the largest-screen-size TV imports compared with 57.7% in the 2019 quarter.

International Trade Today is providing readers with some of the top stories for May 4-8 in case they were missed.

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative announced a new round of Section 301 tariff exclusions (see 2005110005) that includes some medical supplies that were included in the fourth tranche of tariffs.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued another set of product exclusions from the fourth group of Section 301 tariffs on goods from China. The new exclusions from the tariffs include "three 10-digit HTSUS subheadings and five specially prepared product descriptions, which together respond to 27 separate exclusion requests," according to the notice. The product exclusions apply retroactively to Sept. 1, 2019, the date the fourth set of tariffs took effect. The exclusions will remain in effect until Sept. 1.

Backpacks imported from China that faced a 10% tariff, then a 15% tariff, then a 7.5% tariff -- in addition to the standard 17.6% tariff -- can now be excluded from the additional tariff, as long as they are a certain size. Luggage stores that fretted over tariffs that first went up in October 2018 (see 1905090012) say the break won't make a difference now.