Business and Customs Together
By Fermin Cuza
PARIS Business and customs services should join forces to stop
narcotics traffickers from using legitimate commercial shipments to
smuggle illicit drugs.
In this alliance, companies would enforce their own voluntary
standards governing packing and shipping practices, always in close
collaboration with customs. That way, the expertise, technical
knowledge and management skills of business can be brought into a
battle that governments have to win for the sake of the people who put
them in office.
The idea is not as revolutionary as it may sound. In an era of
economic liberalization, governments rely increasingly on business self
regulation instead of imposing standards and requirements themselves.
In the United States, a Business AntiSmuggling Coalition is
running prototype schemes at San Diego, Miami and Laredo, Texas.
This publicprivate partnership will soon extend to the entire country.
Companies in the United States, Mexico and Central and South
America are active participants in this coalition.
In addition, more than 3,000 U.S. air, sea and land carriers
have signed up for a U.S. Customs "Carrier Initiative" program to
share the burden of stopping the inward flow of drugs.
My own company, Mattel, was the first to take part in the anti
smuggling coalition and is leading the prototype operation in San
Diego. We have established partnership agreements with our
manufacturing plants, customs brokers, carriers and vendors.
Partnerships on these lines between business and customs
should be applied internationally without delay, building on the
American experience. Given the huge social costs of drug trafficking
and addiction throughout the industrialized world, business and
governments should move fast.
The mechanism is already there in the cooperation agreement
concluded last year between the International Chamber of Commerce,
representing business throughout the world,, and the World Customs
Organization. Under that agreement, business and customs
administrations plan to work together to promote and support
efficiency in customs control and facilitation.
Certainly one urgent task for the ICC and the WCO is to
devise a burdensharing prograrn in the fight against narcotics
smuggling. Customs administrations worldwide need all the help they
can get in coping with increasingly complex international trade patterns
that make smuggling much harder to detect. The ICC and the WCO
should encourage companies to implement programs within their
organizations and build partnerships with customs.
The chain from raw materials to finished products is
lengthening, and many products contain components of widely
different origins. That means increased opportunities for smugglers to
infiltrate their contraband into legitimate commercial consignments.
As tariff barriers come down, customs' revenueraising function
diminishes in relative importance. The priorities now are interdiction of
drugs, suppression of environmental hazards, monitoring of dangerous
goods and protection of intellectual property. All these customs
objectives have the full support of world business.
Business and governments have a specially clear convergence of
interest in the fight against narcotics smuggling. After all, companies
are part of the communities whose stability is affected by the spread of
drug addiction. The presence of illicit drugs in legitimate shipments
hinders trade and can cause irreparable damage to a company's
reputation.
Responsible corporate citizens must be willing to take
responsibility for securing their factories and shipments to keep them
free from drugs. The adversarial relationship between business and
customs should be a thing of the past. We are all in this together.
The writer, vice president for international trade and
government affairs of Mattel Inc., heads the International Chamber of
Commerce Committee on Customs and Trade Regulations. He
contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.