[pbs] Importing seeds and bulbs
William Aley
aley_wd at mac.com
Thu Feb 26 23:40:50 EST 2009
On the postal delivery side of the equation, it is not a USDA policy
change. There has been no change of policy within the US regulations.
Some of the issues may be long-term memory with the postal service and
the inspecting officials of Homeland Security.
From a fiscal legal issue. you could not send a check to USDA and
have an Officer cash it at a inspection station to add postage. to
much unaccounted money exchange. Not a good option at all. We are
trying to keep the exchange of money out of the daily duties of
officers. temptation is a mean bee to contain.
A few threads past I mentioned that a legal element in the government
is trying to determine fault when a package by-passes the inspection
station?
The school of thought is to charge the importer with the misdeeds of
the exporter. The "official" label reduces the accidental delivery to
the final destination.
By design - having the final destination label on the inside that can
be affixed over the green and yellow seems like a best option. We are
still dealing with getting the parcel back into the system for final
delivery. But I have been assured that the policy is more in the court
of the postal service. We are working on viable solutions that work
for USDA to move commodities and the postal service to recognize that
the material is just passing via the inspection station and that in
most cases the box leaving the inspection station is the same or in
some cases less than when it entered into the Inspection Station.
I'm not too sure who all these people are who would be checking every
parcel entering through the international mail system and if taxpayers
would approve the amount of staff necessary to check every box and
parcel. Or how we are to train everyone at the postal service to look
for specific double addresses labels. Especially when most of the
operations are automated by zip-code readers and barcodes. There are a
lot less live bodies looking at the mail these days and much more
automation from Xray scanning to detection of addresses.
The green and yellow label directs the package to the Plant Inspection
station- it is the address affixed to the box. There are not too many
people watching boxes go by and removing the labelled ones from a
conveyer belt. the delivery goes to the address on the box.
Bill
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