Customs will continue ‘selective’

X-rays of US-bound containers ALAN PEAT CURRENT CUSTOMS procedures for US-bound containers in the port of Durban will continue next year unchanged. “Basically,” said Mike Poverello at customs head office in Pretoria, “every manifest or bill of lading for goods to the US is risk profiled by US customs. “It’s only those that they classify as high risk that are passed on to SA customs – where we then do our own risk profile.” This could involve an X-ray of the container in question. It’s not every container, but based on the risk profiling procedure that was worked out between the SA and the US teams of customs at Durban – designed to check containers of cargo that the US authorities classify as “high risk”. To give an idea of the scale of this requirement for X-ray of containers, Poverello used the figures from the first half of this year. In the first six months, roughly 15 000 containers were shipped from Durban to the US. Of these, only 465 were classified as high risk by US customs. And, of these, 400 were finally X-rayed to check the contents. And this is quite within the capabilities of the X-ray equipment that is already installed at the Durban container terminal. Durban is the only SA port which is container security initiative (CSI) approved – and the only one where X-ray equipment is necessary. Durban even has another claim to individuality, according to Poverello. “There are 20 mega-ports in Europe and Asia which are CSI-approved,” he said, “and Durban remains the only southern hemisphere port on the CSI list at the moment.”