A senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official said this week that CBP has suspended its plans to develop a global trade exchange system that would have expanded the amount of trade data collected by the agency. In his prepared testimony for an April 3 hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Deputy Commissioner Jay Ahern also recommended that 100 percent scanning of U.S.-bound maritime cargo containers be limited to high-risk trade lanes. Ahern discussed the progress CBP has made in implementing its various supply chain security programs, but he pointed out that these efforts are focused on the ocean environment and that there are other areas that need to be addressed as well. Ahern told the committee that after considering comments from the trade community CBP has concluded that “further consideration of the GTX concept is premature at this time and may not be a prudent use of limited resources.” CBP is still finalizing its so-called 10+2 security
In a world faced with the prospect of tightening supplies, higher energy costs heightened geopolitical risk, and strained transportation networks, advanced supply chain technologies will become mission-critical for many more companies. The supply chain task is not an enterprise problem; it is an end-to-end network problem involving multiple enterprises. Therefore, the solution does not lie in fixing one link in the chain but in devising a community.