| Trade Facilitation: U.S., Uganda Call for WTO Ban On 'Consularization' of Imports
By Daniel Pruzin
23 March 2005 GENEVA--The United States and Uganda have issued a joint proposal calling for a ban on so-called "consularization" transactions and fees as part of a future World Trade Organization agreement on trade facilitation.
In their proposal, submitted to a March 22-24 meeting of the WTO's negotiating group on trade facilitation, the two countries said consularization requirements "have an inordinate impact" on exporters from developing countries and are a market access barrier for small and medium size enterprises from all countries. Consularization refers to the requirement that goods intended for export must first be submitted for supervision/certification to the consul of the importing country for the purposes of obtaining consular invoices or visas for commercial invoices, manifests, shippers' export declarations, or verification of other elements necessary customs documentation. "Whatever positive purpose may have once been served by such a requirement for consularization has long been overtaken by the speed of today's trading environment as well as modern administrative techniques for verification that border requirements are being met," the United States and Uganda argued. The two countries noted that member governments of the GATT, the WTO's predecessor, recommended the abolition of consular invoices and visas back in 1952 on the grounds that consularization duplicated functions carried out in the importing country. Although the joint proposal does not cite any specific cases where consularization is a problem, exporters have complained about such requirements in countries such as Argentina, where the government imposed consular transactions for imports of textiles, footwear, and machine tools in 1997.
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