Super Speed Broom

When teaching the piano I like to keep some topical pieces and so this week I started my pupils on a piece called ‘Witch on a Super Speed Broom’ by Martha Mier.   What fun!  Witches generally ride on besom brooms.  Of course such a description does not appear in the customs tariff.   All you get is a plain description ‘Brooms and brushes, consisting of twigs or other vegetable materials bound together, with or without handles’  Chapter 960310.

 

No fun at all!

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Life’s a bowl of cherries

Baking cakes for the local Harvest Festival Fayre today I wondered about the import of glace cherries.  A quick look in the tariff revealed that Chapter 200860 was the right place to go but there were 14 tariff codes!   Information was needed on sugar content, spirit content, quantity, diameter and whether or not they were to be used in chocolate!

 

Mine just topped iced cupcakes.

 

 

 

 

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Lateral thinking

Many Countries' tariff listings are now on-line which is very helpful.  Even better many of them have search fields so that you can simply put in the name of a product.  What could be more straightforward?   All is not as simple as it seems. 

Just try putting ‘teddy bear’ into the search field.   Do you get a code for that loveable furry friendly soft toy?  No! You get all sorts of headings for ball bearings.  

This illustrates the difficulty in using product descriptions in such search engines.

What do you need to type in if you want the code for that loveable teddy bear?

Toys representing animals or non-human creatures – stuffed!

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A simple mushroom?

Not much to discuss here from a customs point of view? 

In the EU tariff mushrooms are classified under:

06 Live trees and other plants; bulbs, roots and the like; cut flowers and ornamental foliage

02 Other live plants (including their roots), cuttings and slips; mushroom spawn

07 Edible vegetables and certain roots and tubers

09 Other vegetables, fresh or chilled

Mushrooms and truffles

Mushrooms

Flap mushrooms

Cultivated mushrooms

10 Vegetables (uncooked or cooked by steaming or boiling in water), frozen

Mushrooms

11 Vegetables provisionally preserved (for example, by sulphur dioxide gas, in brine, in sulphur water or in other preservative solutions), but unsuitable in that state for immediate consumption

Mushrooms of the genus Agaricus

Mushrooms

Mushrooms, excluding mushrooms of the genera Agaricus, Calocybe, Clitocybe, Lepista, Leucoagaricus, Leucopaxillus, Lyophyllum and Tricholoma, provisionally preserved in brine, in sulphur water, or in other preservative solutions, but unsuitable in that state for immediate consumption, for the food-canning industry

Mushrooms and truffles

12 Dried vegetables, whole, cut, sliced, broken or in powder, but not further prepared

Mushrooms, dried, whole or in identifiable slices or pieces, for treatment other than simple repacking for retail sale

Mushrooms, wood ears (Auricularia spp.), jelly fungi (Tremella spp.) and truffles

Mushrooms of the genus Agaricus

20 Preparations of vegetables, fruit, nuts or other parts of plants

01 Vegetables, fruit, nuts and other edible parts of plants, prepared or preserved by vinegar or acetic acid

Mushrooms

03 Mushrooms and truffles, prepared or preserved otherwise than by vinegar or acetic acid

Mushrooms

Of course you need to take care not to be confused – 0722 04 wine in bottles with ‘mushroom’ stoppers…..

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Juice anyone?

Just walk into any large supermarket in the UK and you will see rows of different cartons and bottles of a variety of fruit juices.   Now how many of you would suppose that for example all cartons or bottles of orange juice are equal in customs terms?   Juice is juice right?

Wrong!   Next time you pick up a fruit juice give a thought to customs tariff classification.  Actual composition is everything and no that doesn’t just mean percentage of actual fruit juice.

Some cartons of ‘juice’ are actually classified as flavoured water!

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Can you blame them?

I recently came across this excellent description of goods on a shipping invoice: -

‘Ivory 2 meters’

That’s it, that’s all it said – no tariff code, no anything.  

How could anyone be surprised that Customs were interested to find out if they were shipping elephant ivory in contravention of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species  (CITES).    Needless to say the goods stuck in customs and the only one surprised was the shipper.

What was actually being shipped?    2 meters of Ivory coloured cotton fabric.

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Bejewelled

During my piano lessons this morning (yes I teach piano as well as import / export) it occurred to me to wonder how many of my shipping friends would appreciate the challenge of providing a tariff classification for a functional grand piano that is also a million dollar work of art and contains a player system and electronics.

Take a look at this link to see what I mean ..New York Serenade piano

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