The U.S. Customs Service will station inspectors at the Rotterdam, Netherlands, seaport to inspect cargo heading for the United States, the service announced today (see GSN, June 5).

A U.S.-Dutch agreement will “provide a significant measure of security for the Netherlands, the United States and the global trading system as a whole,” Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said.

In 2001, shippers sent 291,000 cargo containers to the United States from the Rotterdam seaport, Customs said.  Similar agreements to station U.S. inspectors at the seaports in Antwerp, Belgium, and Le Havre, France, could be announced by the end of the week, a Customs official said (Associated Press/New York Times, June 25).

It is the agency’s goal to negotiate inspections agreements with the top 20 seaports that ship cargo to the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal.  About a third of the imports entering the United States and 68 percent of all seaborne imports originate at the top 20 international seaports, the Journal reported.

The United States has taken the right step in negotiating inspections agreements with foreign governments, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.  The magnitude of trying to find a weapon of mass destruction smuggled in one out of millions of cargo containers, however, makes the agreements a small step, he said.

“It would be stupid not to try to expand inspections to foreign ports,” Pike said.  “But it’s a very small part of a very big problem” (Gary Fields, Wall Street Journal, June 25).

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