Dealing With Customs Department (Long)

Many paper works.

Great share. Were u the one who submitted all of these at custom or fedex did it for you?

kindawn wrote:

Great share. Were u the one who submitted all of these at custom or fedex did it for you?

kindawn,

I guess I should start at the beginning, I had ordered the seeds not knowing there would be a problem. The seeds were on the way to the re-mailer. Then I learned that importation may be a problem because seeds were considered plant material and plant material was considered plants.

I Googled rules and regulations for Philippines many times. There was no clear answer about seeds, the only reference was about drug producing seeds.

As per plant material (seeds under their definition) it has to be declared to customs, if not declared it is defined as smuggling  which is a serious problem you don't want to have in the Philippines. Another reason I wanted to be careful because I had clothing purchased from Hanes.com and did not want any forfeitures (almost $200 from Hanes, my US mail and $105 shipping) over a few dollars worth of seeds.

When you ship from a re-mailer there are online forms you have to fill out, so I declared the seeds.

Through research I decided to posed the question (do I need a permit to import seeds) to the Bureau of Plant Industry a division of Department of Agriculture. BPI promptly answered my Email within hours saying the importing of Tomato & Onion seeds are allowed but I had to fill out the proper paperwork consisting of (A) through (H).

My son went to the Land Bank where BPI has their account to pay 300 peso fee (Tried online for transfer but each time it failed.)

Next had to get Brgy clearance letter, I thought I was home free then noticed on the letter there was a place for Individual Tax Certificate numbers, so I had to get an ITC account, (never to be used, but had to have the clearance tax number on the Brgy clearance letter.

Now the package has arrived at Philippine Customs and they saw the declaration and held up shipment for required documents. At this point I had not received clearance from BGI so I contacted FedEx by phone. They gave me an Email address of their local agent, a series of seven digits at FedEx.com

I sent a short Email saying "I need help", the FedEx agent (she) answered me promptly. I sent the duplicate documentation (A) through (H) to her and I'm still  waiting for BPI clearance.

She was in constant contact with me alerting me of the progress, like when the Customs Agent (at his discretion) contacted the NIU Narcotics Interdiction Unit. The NIU now wants the BPI permit.

Then I don't know what happened, she had copies of all the paperwork and she forwarded them to the NIU. The NIU released the shipment.  Meanwhile I'm still waiting for the BPI clearance permit.

All I can say is the FedEx agent went out of her way to solve my problem, above the normal customer service.

Usually customer service is non service to the customer, I don't know how many times in the past I requested customer services from other companies and they got back to me in days, weeks or sometimes not at all.

Also a side note, Reading on Google: Some people hand carried seeds on their trip to the Philippines and declared them. The customs official just smiled and sent them on their way.