Customs in China and the United States will regularly inform each other of the seizures of pirated products and enforcement actions, the head of the US customs agency said in Beijing on Friday.

In a new effort to fight intellectual property rights (IPR) violations, the two countries have signed a memorandum of understanding and agreed to exchange statistics on seizures of counterfeits, according to Ralph Basham, Commissioner for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The statistics will include the number of seizures, quantity and value of goods, transportation type and the main ports of transit used.

In response, the receiving side should report the enforcement actions to the other side within 90 days.

Basham said he hoped the agreement, signed late last month in Washington DC, would help curb counterfeiting.

CBP figures show IPR violation shipments seized at US ports in 2005 were up 125 percent over that in 2001.

Last year, the US customs seized about 14,775 shipments of counterfeits originating from China, Basham said.

"We've got to start dealing with the source of the problem. We can't expect to rely on interdiction to be our tool in order to stop these IPR violations," he said.

Mu Xinsheng, head of China's General Administration of Customs (GAC), said the agreement would lead to more effective IPR enforcement in both countries.

He said in a recent interview that the US has regularly criticized China for alleged failure to prevent IPR infringements, while refusing to provide enough information about seizures of pirated products.

He said piracy and counterfeiting are global problems, and cooperation among countries is a better way to resolve disputes than confrontation.

Official figures show that Chinese customs cracked 2,473 IPR infringement cases last year, or double the number in 2005. About 200 million pirated or counterfeit goods were seized during the period.

During his stay in Beijing this week, Basham also met with Chinese police authorities.

He said cooperation could include introducing China to a US program used at several foreign airports to identify travelers who might be barred from the US.

Another senior CBP official, Michael Mullen, said the US also plans to have more terminals under its Container Security Initiative at the Chinese port of Shenzhen to check and identify high-risk cargo destined for the US. He did not elaborate.

He said the two Chinese ports currently under the initiative, Shenzhen and Shanghai, accounts for about 20 percent of the global exports to the US.

(China Daily 06/16/2007 page1)

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