FREE PORT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 59, 11 March 1937, Page 9

FREE PORT

NEW YORK EXPERIMENT

(From "The Post's" Representative.) NE.W YORK, February 17.

Under charter granted by the United States Government a year ago, the free port established by the City of New York was opened at the beginning of this month. First of its. kind in this country in modern times, it will include the Staten Island piers and thirty acres of surrounding land, which represent a total investment of £6,000,000. The project has been criticised, as well as praised, and is admittedly an experiment. Business interests, in the main, support it strongly. The operation of the free port will be along lines established at the forty or more free ports in other countries. Foreign goods will be admitted without payment of import duty. At the port they will be stored, awaiting favourable markets. Or they may be mixed with other goods, repacked or reclassified, and then sent on to market. No manufacturing will be permitted in the port zone, nor will exhibitions of goods be allowed. ■ The establishment of the port will in no way breach the American tariff wall. All goods leaving the free port for an American destination must pay full import duties. American coastwise shipping will be "protected" by requiring that no goods can be moved from the free port to any American port except in American ships.

It is expected that many costlyduplications of charges, as well as irritating delays in., transhipment of goods, will be eliminated in the operation of the free port. Its principal function will be to supply a convenient place, served by all the principal shipping lines from every port of the world, for transhipment of goods for delivery to a foreign port,' other than the port of origin. A ten-foot wire fence, surrounding the entire area, will help in curbing smugglers, as well as a corps of Customs officers, under a Scottish Commissioner, John Mackenzie.