While the World Trade Organization faces multiple crises, including COVID-19 vaccine export control threats and massive trade wars, the institution's Deputy Director-General Alan Wolff delivered a 10-item agenda for moving forward. Speaking Feb. 9 at a Washington International Trade Association conference, Wolff said the WTO will be judged by “how well it deals with the crises of our time,” saying it must “demonstrate soon and visibly that it can deliver on subjects relevant to all those who engage in international trade or are affected by it ... pretty much everyone.”
Ambassadors from the United Kingdom, Brazil, the European Union and Australia discussed on a Feb. 8 panel how to improve trading relationships with the U.S. and deal with the challenge China poses to the international trading system but had no insights into how to make breakthroughs on either.
The Biden administration announced a slew of appointments to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that do not require Senate confirmation, allowing the agency to get its agenda underway as U.S. trade representative nominee Katherine Tai awaits a hearing and a floor vote.
The White House announced its withdrawals of some nominations left over from the Trump administration. Those include the Jan. 3 nomination of Joseph Barloon, former general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, for a judge's seat on the Court of International Trade. He was first nominated in October 2020, then renominated because all nominations in front of the Senate expired with the seating of the new Congress in January. Also withdrawn was the Jan. 6 nomination of William Kimmitt, a former counselor to the USTR, to fill a vacancy on the International Trade Commission. He was first nominated in December 2020.
The importance and size of the Mexico-U.S. trading relationship does not receive enough recognition in the U.S., Mexico's outgoing ambassador to the U.S., Martha Barcena, said Feb. 5 during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mexico is the U.S.'s no. 1 trading partner, she said, and the economies are inexorably linked, with the automobile supply chain as just one example of it. One piece of a car will cross the border an average of seven times before final assembly, she said.
The U.S. has not publicly released all the companies that have applied for an extended period to get their North American-made vehicles into compliance with the tighter rules of origin, but both Canada and Mexico have published the list of 12 companies that have been approved. Since all three countries must approve alternative staging regimes, it follows that these companies' transition plans are cleared by the U.S., as well. The press office of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is in transition with a change in administrations.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he doesn't know when Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative nominee, might get a hearing in front of the Senate Finance Committee. He told reporters on a press call Feb. 2 that it's likely that Finance will question the Health and Human Services secretary nominee ahead of Tai. He also said he doesn't know how the impeachment trial for Donald Trump could affect the timing. Grassley said he supports President Joe Biden's approach of trying to get Europe, other countries in North America, South Korea and Japan “on the same wavelength with regard to China,” and when he has the opportunity to talk to Tai, he'll be asking about “how long they're going to wait to follow up on phase two” of trade talks with China. He said he doesn't expect the issue of Section 301 exclusions to be on his list of topics to bring up. “I just haven’t had a lot of contact in the last six months with these business interests [with expired exclusions], maybe my staff has,” he said.
Thomas Vilsack, President Joe Biden’s nominee for agriculture secretary, said the agency will prioritize foreign market access for U.S. exporters and secure more trade agreements centered around agriculture. But Vilsack also said increasing competitiveness for U.S. exporters will be challenging, particularly because of the lasting impacts of the Trump administration's unpredictable trade policy.
The Wisconsin Farmers Union is calling on the Biden administration to drop the U.S.'s first USMCA dispute -- a case on Canadian tariff rate quotas -- the group announced in a blog post. WFU said that the demands of the largest dairy companies to tackle Canada's supply management policies on dairy products shouldn't come before needs of small farmers and fair market prices.
Trade advocates and a trade scholar discussed how effective U.S.-Asia sectoral agreements could be, as well as the possible downsides of such agreements, during an Asia Society Policy Institute webinar Jan. 26. The Japan mini-deal was not exactly a sectoral deal because it lowered tariffs on a variety of products across different categories, but the agreement's digital trade plank is one that negotiators could consider as a template for a digital trade accord across more Asian countries.