Bob Zoellick, a U.S. trade representative during the George W. Bush administrations, said that a successful way of completing a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom would be to connect the North American agenda to the U.K. “It gives you more weight,” he said during a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace webinar Feb. 17. “It helps you with North American integration.” He suggested that the FTA could look at carbon emissions, as well as labor, and he believes it could get bipartisan support for extending trade promotion authority, so it could get done.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said he doesn't expect U.S. trade representative nominee Katherine Tai to have a hearing before mid-March. Because there's nothing controversial about her, he said, if she does get a hearing before Congress takes its Easter break, he thinks the full vote can also be done within days. Grassley told reporters on a Feb. 16 phone call that when he spoke with Tai recently, he told her that “I appreciated this administration's approach to China, working to get Japan, South Korea, Europe, Canada, and the United States on the same page with China.” He said he also told her the United Kingdom free trade negotiations “ought to have priority.”
Twenty-two of Florida's 27-member House delegation, led by Democrat Rep. Darren Soto and Republican Rep. Bill Posey, told acting U.S. Trade Representative Maria Pagan that the European Union's 25% tariffs on grapefruit has hurt their constituents. “With the addition of a twenty-five percent retaliatory tariff on top of the existing 1.5 percent tariff, grapefruit exports from Florida have shrunk significantly,” their Feb. 5 letter said. Forty percent of Florida's fresh grapefruit production typically goes to the EU, the representatives said. Soto announced the letter in a news release Feb. 10. “As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida growers have already been struggling to maintain their livelihoods. If immediate action is not taken and the United States loses the fresh grapefruit market in the EU, they could face even harsher consequences,” the letter said. EU officials have said they would be willing to lift the tariffs in the Boeing dispute for six months while the U.S. and the EU try to reach a settlement on aircraft subsidies.
President Donald Trump didn't get China to agree to much in the way of structural changes, panelists said, but Asia Society Policy Institute Vice President Wendy Cutler said he put China front and center on the agenda, which was good. “He was really willing to take on the business community when it came to China,” she said. Cutler, who worked at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative for more than 25 years, said that when she was at USTR, one of her frustrations in trying to negotiate with China was that U.S. “companies were pretty conflicted. They liked the … money they were making. They wanted us to be quote, unquote tough with China, but they didn’t want to be part of the get-tough strategy. Our hands were tied in a way.”
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.