1997 Amendment to Cotton Board Rules and Regulations Adjusting Supplemental Assessment on Imports

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is amending the Cotton Board Rules and Regulations by lowering the value assigned to imported cotton for the purpose of calculating supplemental assessments collected for use by the Cotton Research and Promotion Program. This action is required by this regulation on an annual basis to ensure that the assessments collected on imported cotton and the cotton content of imported products remain similar to those paid on domestically produced cotton. As a result of changes in the 1997 Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS), numbering changes in the import assessment table are amended. Eleven HTS numbers will be eliminated from the assessment table because negligible assessments have been collected on these numbers and their elimination would contribute to reducing the overall burden to importers.