TORONTO — Truckers fretting over the controversial Department of Agriculture levy slated to kick-in next weekend will now have a few more months to prepare.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance reports that the USDA’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service will postpone the collection of the controversial fee until March 1, 2007. The rule was scheduled to take affect on Nov. 24 of this month.

The CTA says the delay will allow affected groups to make necessary preparations in order to comply with the inspection and collection procedures.

Fresh Obsessed: Critics claim the US is using Canadian
truckers to get cash for more border inspections

However, while he’s relieved about the latest announcement, CTA CEO David Bradley says he’ll still push for the rule to be withdrawn.
Although it’s an agriculture-based rule — designed to pay for additional inspections to guard against pests and bio-terror risk in food and agriculture products — all carriers that cross the border, regardless of what they’re hauling, are required to pay up.

When the rule eventually takes affect in March, truckers will have to fork over $5.25 US per crossing, or $105 a year — on top of the current border crossing fee charge.

“It sounds like a cash grab to me — plain and simple,” Canadian Food Exporters Association President Susan Powell said in a recent in a recent interview with Today’s Trucking.

She isn’t the only one who feels USDA is trying to fund services on the backs of Canadian industries.

“I think it’s ridiculous. We already pay enough in taxes and tolls when we’re crossing the border. It should be U.S. citizens that pay for this, not truck drivers,” says Mike Racine, an owner-op with Winnipeg Motor Express.

The good news, however, is that USDA and US Customs have agreed to dovetail the administrative process for both fees as a way to mitigate inevitable confusion and delays that would result from two separate systems.

As TodaysTrucking.com first reported last month, officials have agreed to integrate the USDA fee with the existing CBP border-crossing charge (CBP has posted instructions at www.cbp.gov on how to amalgamate the fees). In other words, carriers will now have to pay $205 to CBP to get their transponder.

Industry hopes a 3 month delay in the USDA fee means
less chaos at borders when it does take affect

CBP will automatically track trucks with a valid 2006 transponder. Drivers of these units will not have to pay the user fee at the primary inspection line. The carrier will be billed directly for $5.25 times the number of crossings, which occur between November 24 and December 31.

“Certainly, carriers are not happy about their border crossing fees more than doubling, but at least they’ve done the right thing and integrated the fees because it would have been a real mess with one (USDA) decal and one (CBP) transponder,” says the CTA’s regulatory affairs director Ron Lennox said.

Still, that’s little comfort to truckers who haul auto parts but are forced to subsidize the cost of extra inspections for asparagus loads — even if they have been given some more time to prepare.

Also frustrated are carriers and shippers who have already made large investments in security clearance programs like C-TPAT, and FAST, as well as the advance notification rules already in place for both Customs and the Food and Drug Administration.

“That’s a real sore point,” says Lennox. “They’ve spent a lot of time in the U.S. going to a risk-based process so they can focus their enforcement efforts on areas of high or unknown risk. What [the U.S.] has done here is say ‘it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what you’re carrying. You’re going to pay the fee no matter what.’ That flies in the face of the philosophy behind risk management which they’ve been professing for the last number of years.”

The CFEA’s Susan Powell is concerned that some of her members will have to absorb thousands of dollars in annual increases as transport providers attempt to pass the bill forward. With capacity as tight as it is — especially in the refrigerated sector — Powell says food exporters have little choice but to try to squeeze the extra costs into already tight transportation budgets.

“Many of [our members] can’t really increase their prices to their customers right now,” she says. “Depending on how many shipments they have going to the U.S., it can have a really substantial effect.”

(For more on this issue be sure to pick up the current November print issue of Today’s Trucking).