The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is expected to release the new rules for submitting electronic import certificates for shipments containing organic food, feed, or fiber. The AMS is expected to ‘flag’ 7,200 tariff numbers as potentially subject to this requirement. Therefore, it will become important that the documents indicate whether or not a product is ‘certified organic.’ The customs broker will need to either file the disclaimer or provide the import certificate number from the foreign exporter.
This week, CSMS #42280794 was released stating that the message set for the National Organics Program will be in the testing mechanism of CBP’s ACE (Automated Commercial Environment) system on April 25th, 2020.
This means that brokers will soon be able to test the data transmission of entries that are flagged for this requirement. The AMS is working on a notice of proposed rulemaking to require their data in ACE, but that is not expected for at least one year.