Hawai‘i US Rep. Ed Case has reintroduced a bill in the US House to end what he called “the discriminatory and exclusionary shipping practices faced by residents and businesses in Hawai‘i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and other US territories.”
Guam US Representative James Moylan is the co-lead on the measure, with co-sponsors US Reps. Pablo José Hernández Rivera of Puerto Rico, Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen of American Samoa and Kimberly King-Hinds of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Representatives from US territories are delegates to Congress, with votes in committee but not on the House floor.
Case said H.R. 380, the Affordable Shipping Act for All Act “will ensure that no shipping company, including the United States Postal Service, can impose discriminatory rates or exclude non-contiguous areas from receiving shipments. It will also require that shipping rates for non-contiguous areas reflect the actual cost of service, rather than arbitrary price increases.”
Case continued: “This blatant discrimination and exclusion is illustrated by Hawai‘i, my home state. We are over 2,500 miles from the West Coast and depend on shipping to bring in more than 90% of the products we need. Like our other non-contiguous family, we do not have the same manufacture, transport and delivery options as does the contiguous continental US.”