Ofer Notes

September 2026: Customs Has Become an Enforcement Authority

Europe, the US and China are rewriting the rules of global logistics within the same two years. The Red Sea is just background noise, but believe any story you like…

In 2025, around 5.9 billion low-value e-commerce items entered the EU, and more than 90 percent of them came from China.. At roughly the same time, the United States closed its $800 window.

Anyone still talking about “trade disruption” as if it were mainly a shipping-lane problem is missing the structural shift.

Last decade’s logistics was measured in kilos, volume and spot rates. The logistics coming in now is measured in data, legal liability, origin and carbon.

Three capitals - Brussels, Washington and Beijing - did not coordinate calendars. They simply closed the same loophole in the same time window: the anonymous, cheap shipment with no real importer and no product file.

Europe Reinvents Customs

On 26 March 2026, the European Parliament and the Council reached agreement on the biggest reform of the Customs Union since 1968. In September the new regulation was published: a new Customs Code, a European Customs Authority in Lille, France, and a single data network meant to replace more than a hundred national systems. The legal title is boring. The content is not.

First, the €150 threshold is dead. As an interim solution, from 1 July 2026 a temporary duty of €3 applies per item in parcels up to €150 - per classification item, not necessarily per parcel. This measure is temporary until July 2028, or until the central data system is able to collect regular duty on every shipment (!!!). By 1 November 2026 at the latest, a handling fee on distance-sales shipments will be added as well. The amount will be set in Brussels and updated every two years, or alternatively each country will do as it pleases.

Second, and this is the key point: the platform is the importer.. Whoever sells remotely to a consumer in the EU, and not the consumer waiting for the parcel by the mailbox, carries responsibility for the formalities, the payment, the data and the product’s compliance with the rules.

This is not a footnote in the regulation. It is a transfer of liability from the weakest link in the chain to whoever runs the transaction. A platform that repeats the same import errors, if it does, risks a fine of one to six percent of the value of its imports over the previous 12 months, and the loss of its authorised trader status.

Third, Europe is building one gate instead of 27 doors. The Data Hub will start with e-commerce in 2028, open to other traders in 2031, and become mandatory in 2034. Meanwhile AEO status (approved importer) remains, a Trust and Check track has been added for reliable traders, and bonded storage is back to up to 90 days after threats to cut the time.. Whoever has a clean importer track record will get fewer inspections, and whoever lives on “it’ll be fine” declarations will pay in time and money.

And that’s not all. ICS2 Release 3 is already live: security data is required in advance not only for air, but also for sea, road and rail. Since 1 September 2025, with specific exceptions that dragged on into 2026, a truck without a complete Entry Summary Declaration is a truck that does not get in. The border has become a data screen, not a physical barrier.

Customs No Longer Just Collects Duty

The common mistake is to think the reform is a Brussels IT story. It isn’t. European customs has become the enforcement gate for policies that were not born in the customs department…customs has become the executing arm…

Since 1 January 2026, the definitive CBAM regime applies to steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen. Knowing the CFR price is no longer enough. You need to know how much carbon was emitted in production, at the specific plant, and then buy certificates and surrender them. The first declaration and the first payment are due by 30 September 2027, on 2026 imports. Without verified data from the Chinese or Indian furnace, the European importer pays according to default values.. meaning, expensively. Small importers of less than 50 tonnes a year in most categories received a mass exemption; anyone above the threshold enters the full regime.

On 12 August 2026 the new Packaging Regulation, PPWR, came into force. Anyone who thought this was about the carton on the supermarket shelf is wrong. Transport packaging is included too: pallets, stretch film, groupage cartons, filling material. Who the “packaging producer” is, is no longer a semantic question. It is a question of registration, a declaration of conformity, and later extended producer responsibility as well.

On 30 December 2026, after two postponements, the Deforestation Regulation will also start applying to large and medium-sized companies. Coffee, cocoa, soy, palm oil, wood, rubber, cattle.. no due diligence statement and no geolocation coordinates of the plot (!!!!), no release. Micro and small companies got an extension until June 2027. The central system is no longer theoretical.

You can add to the list the digital product passport, and the ban on forced-labour goods arriving in December 2027. The picture is one: the document that used to be a bill of lading plus an invoice is becoming a data package. Origin, carbon, packaging, forest, labour, product safety. Whoever reaches the border without this package is not “delayed a day”. He does not get in.

Everything is becoming a game of supplying data the system will accept- you have it? Maybe you’ll pass- you don’t? You’re out of the game…The goal is one- control, and getting rid of the small operator, the one who can’t carry the extra costs- it is simply easier to control a few big players than a crowd of small ones….

America Closes the Same Door From a Different Angle

The United States did not build a new federal customs authority in the Lille style. It did something simpler, and more brutal: it killed the low-value exemption.

On 29 August 2025 the exemption was suspended for all countries. In 2026 the suspension was anchored in regulations, including a new track for postal shipments. On 1 July 2027 it is due to become a repeal in law. The operational meaning is clear to anyone who has ever handled a $40 parcel from China: every shipment needs a classification, an entry, and an actual broker. The fixed handling cost sometimes hurts more than the duty itself.

At the same time, the American importer no longer pays “duty”. He pays a stack. Regular duty, Section 301 duties on China, a forced-labour surcharge, Section 232 duties on metals and vehicles, and layers that kept changing during 2025-2026 by executive order. An error in origin or classification is not a one-line mistake on an invoice. It is double exposure.

Washington has also started looking at the structure of the transaction, not just the product. Enforcement orders from 2026 target artificial DDP, straw-man American importers with no assets, double invoicing and conveniently changed origin. Whoever wants to be Importer of Record has to be an importer, not a mailbox.

UFLPA, the law on forced labour in Xinjiang, stopped being a 2022 headline long ago. It is routine port detention. Whoever has no supply-chain map does not argue with an officer. He waits. And there is no messiah on the horizon.

The point is not “Trump versus China”. The point is that America closed the small-parcel loophole in the same time window in which Europe closed it. The same political pressure: domestic industry, flooded postal systems, unsafe products, and a border that cannot be managed without data.

China Isn’t Just Reacting. China Is Changing the Exit Rules

The second mistake is to describe China as merely absorbing tariffs. Beijing is building an export regime that parallels, in method if not in spirit, American export controls.

Since 2023 the export taps have been shut on gallium, germanium, graphite and antimony (whatever that is..). In April 2025 rare earths and magnets were added. In October 2025 the list was expanded, and rules with extraterritorial effect were also put on the table: a Chinese licence even for a transfer between two foreign countries, if the product contains traces of Chinese material. Some of the measures were frozen until November 2026. The freeze itself proves the weapon, it doesn’t cancel it- China can apply it or not apply it, the market will react wildly to the mere intention..that has meaning, and it is a Chinese weapon…

For the Chinese exporter and the European forwarder it’s the same thing in the warehouse: a licence from the Ministry of Commerce is a bottleneck, not a supporting paper. Shipping a component containing a rare earth element is no longer “general cargo”.

CBAM does something quieter and deeper to China. The direct effect on total exports to Europe is still limited - most of the coverage is steel and aluminium. The institutional effect is big. A plant that wants to keep a European customer must learn to measure emissions, verify them, and pass them on. Without that, the buyer pays by default values. European law is becoming a floor requirement in a Chinese factory.

And on top of both sit the platforms. The same companies that filled Europe’s postal system and America’s warehouses with single parcels are now being hit by two hammers at once: €3 and handling fees in Brussels, and the end of de minimis in Washington. The response is already visible on the ground: less direct mail, more consolidated imports, more local warehousing, more European or American entities acting as importer. Whoever only counts express flights from China will discover that the volume hasn’t disappeared. It’s changing shape.

What Actually Happened

Three threads stitch the picture together.

1. Same goal, three methods. Europe puts importer status on the platform and builds a data network. America kills the low-value exemption and piles on tariffs. China holds the material tap and the licence. The result is the same. No shipment without a name, without a classification and without a file.

2. Customs has become a multi-disciplinary authority. It used to check origin and duty rate. Now it is also the gatekeeper for carbon, forests, forced labour, packaging and product safety. ICS2, the CBAM registry and the EUDR system are not three IT projects. They are three layers of the same border.

3. The winner is whoever has data, not whoever has the cheaper price. An authorised trader, an importer with a real balance sheet, a supplier who can deliver a carbon report and an export licence. The forwarder who used to be a phone and a truck is largely becoming a control function. Compliance stays with the importer and the exporter. A forwarder who doesn’t know how to ask the right questions simply delivers cargo to the point where it gets stuck. That is why a different kind of professionalism is demanded of him today.

Not a Brussels Theory. A Warehouse Bill

Whoever sends a quote today and writes only freight, without stating what is missing from the file - customs, data, licences, who the importer is, is selling a price that doesn’t hold up in reality. He isn’t lying to the customer. He is lying to himself that the shipment will end at the price he wrote

The basic door-to-door terms - have changed meaning. In Europe the remote seller is the importer. In the US, DDP without a real, genuine and active importer won’t pass, and not in Europe either. Consolidation makes sense again against millions of single parcels. A warehouse in Europe gains new value: one release, local splitting, instead of thousands of entry declarations.

The customer asking why he suddenly needs furnace data from the steel mill doesn’t need a lecture on climate. He needs one sentence: without this data the goods get in expensively, or don’t get in.

We can keep talking about blocked routes. They exist, and they hurt. But whoever writes in 2026 about the change in global logistics and starts with the Red Sea is starting at the wrong end. The real change sits in customs, in the licence and in the file. Whoever has all three will move. Whoever doesn’t will find that the ship arrived, and the cargo stayed at the terminal.

Data correct as of September 2026, based on publications of the European Commission, the European Parliament, CBP and China’s Ministry of Commerce. Regulation is in motion (please verify implementation dates before commercial publication if you wish.)