A proposal by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Services that would increase costs for the produce trade and have an impact on Chilean imports has come under fire by two members of Congress.

On Sept. 24, 2014, Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) and Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), issued a letter to their colleagues in Congress stating that in late April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service, commonly referred to as APHIS, proposed increasing existing and establishing new Agriculture Quarantine Inspection fees. The letter also stated that APHIS did not —as it should have under Executive Order 13563 of Jan. 18, 2011 — seek the views of many affected stakeholders before issuing the proposed rulemaking.

They furthermore stated that failing to properly engage stakeholders is a significant failure in this case because APHIS is changing the method it uses to determine AQI user fees for the various services it provides. For example, fees for commercial trucks would increase by 52 percent, commercial trucks with transponders by 205 percent, commercial vessels by 66 percent and commercial aircraft by 218 percent.

The rulemaking also establishes a new $375 per pest treatment fee, $2 for each international cruise vessel passenger and lifts the fee caps for commercial trucks, vessels and railcars.

The maximum amount a commercial vessel presently pays is $7,440 per year. Under the pending rulemaking, a commercial cargo vessel with a weekly call to the U.S. from the Caribbean, for example, would pay $42,900, nearly five times the current fee not including overtime fees.

According to APHIS, the AQI rulemaking increases AQI user fees by $530.6 million, much of which will be borne by small, port-related businesses such as importers, commercial truckers, cargo and passenger vessels and aircraft.

Byrne and Wilson further noted that they recognize that APHIS needs additional financial resources to adequately safeguard U.S. borders from destructive invasive pests and that AQI user fees have not been increased in 10 years. And they also appreciate that the rulemaking seeks to more closely align, by class, the cost of AQI services provided and user fee revenue received. In its current form, however, they state the AQI proposal will be extremely disruptive and must be reconsidered.

They also addressed a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack the same day. It stated the same information as the letter to Congress, but also urged APHIS to consider withdrawing the pending rulemaking and instead negotiating another more workable proposal with representative of affected industries.

On Jan. 13, 2015, the APHIS conducted an AQI Stakeholder Webinar giving callers an opportunity to ask questions and comment on the proposal. At the webinar it stated that it had received 248 comments at its prior comment period. Most callers to the webinar expressed frustration and even confusion over the proposal.

One example was a call from Thomas Verbitski with David Oppenheimer & Co. He questioned the methodology of the treatment fees of $375 per treatment.

“I’m just curious how the metric was applied,” he said in the webinar. “If you look at the biggest stacks in the largest fumigation ports in the country, over 60,000 cartons, it comes to six-tenths of a cent. Then if you do it at the pallet level, say at an airport, it’s $3.90 a carton, just saying, at 100 cartons on a pallet.

“How that could be assessed as something that’s fair or that can be absorbed by a shipper or a grower simply just doesn’t seem to be practical. If the number was taken against the total cost of services divided by the number of treatments, no one’s questioning that the government needs to accrue the money, but the methodology as to how it’s applied is certainly suspect by the import industry.”

The full webinar is available as a PowerPoint presentation, audio recording and written transcript at http://1.usa.gov/17PM9Vf.