U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, in her first interview since taking office, said that she's hearing from stakeholders who say the additional tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods from China damages the economy, but she's not inclined to remove them without concessions from China. “No negotiator walks away from leverage, right?” she said. “I have heard people say, ‘Please just take these tariffs off,’” Tai told The Wall Street Journal. But “yanking off tariffs,” she warned, could harm the economy unless the change is “communicated in a way so that the actors in the economy can make adjustments.”
Bill Brock, a U.S. trade representative during the Reagan administration, died March 25 at age 90 of pneumonia, according to published reports.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Singapore Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing spoke March 26 about the two countries' free trade agreement, and agreed to talk more on digital trade, climate and reform of the World Trade Organization.
A readout of U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai's call with India's Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal made no mention of the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, where India was the largest beneficiary before it was barred over U.S. medical device and dairy exporters' complaints. The Indian government did not release a press release summarizing its view of the call. Tai's office said that they “agreed to work constructively to resolve key outstanding bilateral trade issues and to take a comprehensive look at ways to expand the trade relationship.”
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai held a video call with Peter Altmaier, Germany's federal minister for economics, and they discussed the challenge of unfair trading practices of large non-market economies, such as China. “They also discussed their strong interest in resolving the dispute related to large civil aircraft subsidies, addressing global steel and aluminum overcapacity, and cooperating on climate change,” according to the summary of the March 24 call.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, along with meat, dairy, corn, soybean and other exporters from 27 organizations in all are telling Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai that the agriculture trade relationship with Mexico “has declined markedly, a trend USMCA’s implementation has not reversed.” They said in a March 22 letter that they're particularly concerned about the glyphosate ban and the ban on genetically modified corn for human consumption; mandatory Conformity Assessment Procedures for cheeses; and the requirement for organic foods to be certified under Mexican standards by June. “This is an extraordinarily short timeline for implementation. If this policy is enforced, U.S organic producers will experience significant trade disruptions as certification can take a year or more for organic companies to become certified to a new organic standard,” they wrote.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai opened her first full week on the job with a series of video calls with major allies and trading partners -- Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union -- and diplomatic summaries of the calls from both sides mostly echoed each other, suggesting there was a good deal of agreement.
A top European Commission trade official said that it's not reasonable to expect that countries can agree on reforms to dispute settlement that would satisfy the U.S. by November this year. So, Ignacio Garcia Bercero said, countries will need to set a goal of restoring the binding dispute settlement system for the 2023 ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. “The WTO without binding dispute settlement is not the WTO,” Garcia Bercero said during a presentation online at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on March 19. “The continued escalation of conflicts if we don’t have a functioning dispute settlement system should be something we should all be worried about.”
A former World Trade Organization appellate body member and a longtime U.S. trade representative's environment advisory committee member agree that an attempt to create a carbon adjustment mechanism by the European Union is likely to violate trade law and support protectionist aims.
House Ways and Means Committee chief trade counsel Katherine Tai was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. trade representative on March 17, by a 98-0 vote. Politicians from both parties, trade skeptics and export-focused trade associations all hailed her promotion to the Biden administration Cabinet. She is the first woman of color to be USTR.