No holding back

No holding back Raven remains a torchbearer for trade facilitation in intergovernmental circles.

By Chris Gillis

   Government officials at the Brussels-based World Customs Organization know John Raven isn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers in defense of trade facilitation.
   Even now, when the sprite 90-year-old stands up in a crowded room of customs officers to ask a question or make a point, he gets everyone’s attention. Raven doesn’t hold back.
   ‘My first impression of him when we first met in the early 1990s was that when he spoke you would do well to listen,’ said David Hesketh, a former WCO technical officer and retired British Customs officer, who now consults and writes on customs matters.
   A handful of former government and industry officials, who either worked for the WCO or interacted with the organization, had similar reflections of Raven.

Raven

   ‘There were occasions when the rest of us were ready to say it was not the time to make our case’ on an express carrier issue, recalled former U.S. Treasury official John Simpson, who until recently was director general of the Global Express Association (formerly the International Express Carrier Coalition or IECC), an industry group in Brussels led by Raven from 1999 to 2000. ‘John never backed off. I have to admire him for that.’
   Many WCO officials have never hesitated to bounce their concepts and policy ideas off Raven for his insights into potential industry impacts.
   ‘When taking up my work at the WCO, John was a permanent go-to person to get an accurate and honest industry perspective,’ said former German Customs officer Dietmar Jost, who now runs his own consulting firm. ‘He is familiar with all necessary management disciplines and knows how business works.’
   During the June 2010 WCO Council session, Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya recognized Raven for his insights and abilities to understand complex customs and trade issues, in addition to his ‘great sense of humor.’ The council gave him a standing ovation.
   This highlight may mark the end to a career for some, but not for Raven. He has even more ideas for how to advance the co-existence between customs control and trade facilitation.

‘Uncoiled Spring.’ Born and raised outside of London, Raven’s youth was anything but privileged. His father, a flour salesman, was downsized into long periods of unemployment during Great Britain’s pre-World War II economic turbulence. When asked about his early education in an interview, he said ‘I was good at writing, but school was hell.’
   Raven persevered and at 17 got a firm financial base from several scholarships at Cambridge University where he learned under F.R. Leavis, a renowned British literary critic, until Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939.
   Like most young men of the time, Raven enlisted, but his military service was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a hospital for the next four years. Raven used this time to extend his reading and, as he described, ‘strengthen my imagination by looking at the ceiling every Monday and fixing what to think about for the particular week.’
   From 1944 to 1946, Raven served trial stints as a pine disinfectant salesman in the Welsh valleys and then a post-war planner at a munitions factory and an assistant buyer for a drop forge company. When the end of the war eliminated job restrictions on employment, he persuaded Sir William Crawford and Partners, innovators in industrial design, to accept a proposal to start an information bureau in London.
   In 1946, Raven returned to Wales to become assistant secretary of the South Wales Industrial Association. As a result of disagreement with the association’s chairman, Raven ended up back in London as assistant secretary of the once powerful British Coal Exporters’ Federation, and a year later, with the death of its secretary general, he became its director general. Raven was only 27 years old and ‘an uncoiled spring,’ he said.
   The British government nationalized coal production after the war. Coal exporters, who used to operate with commercial freedom, found themselves as agents to a common commission with only occasional pickings from freighting operations. In 10 years, the post-war market went from a situation where there was no coal and many customers to one where there was ample coal but the customers had disappeared. It was then that Raven said he had to carry out the hardest task in his entire career ‘ persuading his members that their federation was no longer useful and needed to be terminated.
   Within two weeks of closing the coal federation in early 1968, another chapter opened for Raven. He was asked by the U.K. Board of Trade to organize and service a small expert committee to look at procedural, regulatory and documentary hindrances to U.K. international trade and to recommend changes. This was new territory for Raven.
   ‘In 21 years of dealing with coal exports, I never met a customs officer. That’s not surprising. After all there were no duties and who wanted to get in close quarters with all that dirt and dust?’ he said.
   Two years later, equipped with the committee’s 32 recommendations, Raven became chief executive of the U.K. Committee for the Simplification of International Trade Procedures, better known as SITPRO, and began over a decade of ‘systematic fact-finding, analysis and persuasion,’ he said.
   The SITPRO report, which was released in March 1970, became the starting point for international trade’s discussion and drive to facilitation. ‘It explained what we are for is simplified international trade procedures and the information flows that service them. That was the new trumpet call,’ Raven said.
   Some of the report’s most groundbreaking recommendations included a call for the progressive use of computers ‘ then a novel resource ‘ associated agreement on international data standards, adoption of an international container marking code, and deferred payment of customs duties for compliant traders.
   SITPRO’s management was charged to give full international publicity and support to the basic need for simpler and standardized commercial and official procedures.
   This remit sparked what would become a 40-year crusade by Raven to urge trade regulators, especially customs administrations, to embrace and deliver facilitative practices. Alongside a brief stint in the early 1970s as director general for the Association of British Chambers of Commerce, Raven was able to focus his message on the need for trade facilitation while head of SITPRO from 1974 to 1984.

Sharp Pen. During his time at SITPRO, Raven sharpened his pen on frequent opportunities to write center page articles on coal and energy policy for London’s widely circulated Daily Telegraph (the newspaper at the time had sales of more than 1 million copies a day). The Telegraph’s editors also allowed him to write a weekly column on government and business under the pseudonym John Bosworth.
   Whether as Raven or Bosworth, he established himself as a voice for free trade and small business. He wrote in a 1969 column regarding imports, for example, that, ‘once a spiral of (import) restrictions begins it could rapidly get out of control and affect the whole atmosphere of world trade.’ Countering those who at the time wanted to impose greater barriers on imports entering Britain, he warned: ‘Perhaps more important than any of these objections is the defeat which import restrictions would represent for the pacific growth of free international trade.’
   He also crusaded for improvements to women’s role in the workplace. In a 1968, Raven boldly wrote, ‘If sex determination were practicable in Britain today, prudent parents would be obliged, if considering only the commercial interest of their offspring, to opt for a boy ‘ Lack of apprenticeship opportunities ‘ and hence of access to craft and many middle-management jobs ‘ (for women) results mainly from formal restrictions imposed by unions and employers, but in top jobs the real problem is one of attitudes.’
   Raven decided to end his column with the Telegraph in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power as Britain’s prime minister, a leader who he said ‘cleared away all the nationalized and bureaucratic undergrowth, reduced the trade unions to a reasonable role at the political bargaining table and so effectively abolished most of the grounds for any further Bosworth fulminations.’
   He was in any case very busy abroad for such organizations as the World Bank and the United Nations’ Development Program (UNDP) and Conference on Trade Development. He routinely traveled between London, Brussels, Paris, Geneva and Washington to educate and inform regulatory policymakers about the benefits of improving cross-border trade, and worked in and maintained contact with government and trade interests in upwards of 35 countries.
   Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the express carriers became the de facto messengers to governments on the importance of trade facilitation, and the industry would serve as a platform for Raven to continue his facilitation drive. Raven moved to Brussels in 1990, after a brief semi-retirement in provincial France, to become director general of the IECC whose members include UPS, FedEx, TNT and DHL.
   Under Raven’s leadership, the express carriers would become more prominently engaged with the WCO in an effort to simplify and harmonize global customs procedures. This industry was particularly influential in helping the U.S. and Canadian Customs support the production of the WCO Immediate Release Guidelines, and took a keen interest in work on the revised WCO Kyoto Convention on the simplification and harmonization of customs procedures resulting in 1999 in a new and significantly improved text.

Beyond 2010. Since his ‘retirement’ from the IECC in 2000, Raven has served as an advisor to The International Air Cargo Association, a position he held until the end of 2010. Yet he remains active in WCO affairs.
   Free from the pressures of administering a trade group, Raven has become more embolden in his views in how customs administrations might improve their management of trade during a time of heightened security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
   Raven provided industry input and support for the development of the post 9/11 WCO SAFE Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Trade, the Data Model, Unique Consignment Reference (UCR), and capacity building for developing countries’ customs operations.
   He’s urged restraint in the WCO against blanket support for general adoption of such special U.S. innovations as Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) and its continued calls for additional trade data and 100-percent cargo scanning. He warned that even the Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) regimes that have formed in recent years among some customs administrations, especially in Europe, have limited benefits and profuse costs.
   Raven is also no fan of the WCO taking direction from the highly politicized World Trade Organization. The UNDP commissioner during a September meeting on capacity building, which Raven attended, floated a query of whether the WCO should apply to become a U.N. agency. ‘This would certainly give it a better status in relation to the WTO, which might feel obligated to move deeply into customs affairs if the current facilitation negotiations ever terminate in an agreement,’ he said.
   Looking ahead into the next decade, Raven believes the WCO SAFE Working Group can help return trade facilitation to a ‘procedural reality.’ In an October 2010 WCO News article, Raven said the group’s ‘first task should be to seek to link and subject operational risk management to constantly updated risk assessment.’
   Second and simultaneously, he said the working group should ‘seek some shift back towards pre-9/11 data frugality. Somewhere in a more rational future we might hope for a retreat from transaction-based controls to the old familiar post-entry audit systems for fully compliant traders. These might need to be achieved, gradually perhaps, through a decompression chamber of continuing advance data supply arrangements, but with small and diminishing core data sets finishing, ideally, with a truly Unique Consignment Reference (UCR) identification tag.
   ‘This activity would require the group to sift through all the new C-TPAT and AEO requirements to separate out elements that could really answer facilitation needs.’
   Raven recommends the WCO in the next 10 years take strong leadership in deepening and widening the ‘corporate sense of the global customs community.’
   ‘Meantime it would be timely for a small group of interested multinational companies, perhaps through the International Chamber of Commerce, to consider with the WCO Ad Hoc Group on Globally Network Customs and/or the WCO Information Management Sub-Committee, how far and in what ways they might be able to offer piggyback facilities to Customs services from certain developing countries, in that efforts at first, to facilitate inter-Customs communications,’ he added.
   In that regard, Raven told American Shipper he prefers the WCO’s former name Customs Cooperation Council (CCC). In 1994, the CCC decided to adopt the name World Customs Organization to reflect the fact that it had become a global intergovernmental institution.
   ‘I like the CCC because it emphasized cooperation,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, an organization is just an organization. The WCO is still an unfailing advocate and practitioner of customs-to-customs and customs-to-trade partnership, but it is a pity that the word ‘cooperation’ no longer figures in the shop sign.
   ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I am deeply appreciative, on my personal account, of the many years of privileged access to this remarkable organization during which cooperation has, I think, ripened and softened into a rather warmer mutual affection.’