Industry News

APHIS to Require Use of Metric Units of Measure for Lacey Act Declarations Beginning July 1st

May 21, 2010


According to Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, importers will be required to report plant material quantities using standardized metric units for both paper and electronic Lacey Act Amendment declaration beginning July 1, 2010.

CBP officials also confirmed that there will be no programming changes in the Automated Broker Interface (ABI) to support APHIS’ metric only requirement. As a result, electronic filers will have to select metric units among the choices that have programmed.

Beginning July 1, 2010, APHIS will be contacting filers who fail to report plant material quantities in metric units and requiring them to resubmit their declarations. As ABI does not currently support resubmissions or corrections for Lacey Act declarations, electronic will be required to submit new paper declarations.

APHIS feels that they have the authority to impose a metric only unit of measure requirement, for both paper and electronic declarations, in order to obtain higher quality data.