Assessing Trade Facilitation for Halal Food Import Through Seafreight Cross Border

Abstract

Trade facilitation is widely known as an aid to international trade for moving across the border. It is instantly referred as a remedial effort towards procedures and documentation related to the import and export process. The major setup for trade facilitation is to achieve four main principles in border crossing process referring to simplification, harmonization, standardization and transparency related to border formalities. Meanwhile, in the later stage, strategic operational objectives were developed as a supporting measure towards the implementation of trade and transport facilitation from operational perspective. The strategy is mainly developed from the fundamental cross border operational resources as performance indicators to achieve the principle goals.  Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of the cross-border import process for Halal food trade through sea freight logistics. The extent indicators for cross border operational performance is determined through food import clearance process. This study used a series of semi structured interview with 15 stakeholders from various core activities related to food import clearance within the border. It was found that regulation, policy, knowledge, experience, visibility, commitment, attitude, mentality and consistency were some of the additional operational determinants to strategic operational performance in border crossing activities. The newly discovered determinants must be addressed accordingly before any further attempt on measuring trade facilitation performance during border crossing process can be made. Previous trade and transport facilitation performance objectives study was conducted in Port Santos Brazil and involved superficial border crossing process but this study demonstrated every facet of border clearance activities using Halal trade subject matter within Malaysian border