President Biden has issued a proclamation revising the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S. to modify certain U.S. free trade agreement and trade preference program provisions, as follows.
- effective Jan. 1, 2023 (including goods withdrawn from warehouse on or after this date), terminates the designation of Burkina Faso as a beneficiary sub-Saharan African country under the African Growth and Opportunity Act
- extends through Dec. 31, 2023, a 2004 agreement with Israel that provides duty-free access to specified quantities of certain agricultural products of that country
- effective Jan. 1, 2023, implements further staged tariff reductions under the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement
- effective Jan. 1, 2017, or Jan. 27, 2022, corrects technical errors in previous HTSUS modifications that reflected amendments to the international Harmonized System
With respect to the termination of Burkina Faso, the president has previously said that this country “has not established, or is not making continual progress toward establishing, the protection of the rule of law and of political pluralism” in accordance with the AGOA eligibility requirements. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai specifically cited the country’s “unconstitutional changes in government” and called on it to “return to elective democracy.” She added that USTR will provide Burkina Faso with “clear benchmarks for a pathway toward reinstatement” to AGOA eligibility and that the Biden administration “will work with them to achieve that objective.”
For more information on AGOA, including country eligibility and how to utilize available tariff preferences, please contact Nicole Bivens Collinson at (202) 730-4956 or via email.
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