The Senate approved House Ways and Means Chief Trade Counsel Katherine Tai to be the U.S. Trade Representative with no opposition. The Senate voted 98-0 in favor of the confirmation.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
Central American ambassadors and the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration asked an audience to rediscover the region as a source of trusted supply chain partners and a way to achieve quicker deliveries with a lower carbon footprint.
Ireland's Prime Minister Micheál Martin told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce audience that as the U.S. is looking for trusted partners to make sure its supply chains are resilient, it should look to Ireland. He noted that his country was the fifth-largest supplier of coronavirus-related goods.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will be meeting with some top Chinese officials March 18, but the trade war will not be front and center, he told reporters at a White House press conference March 12. A reporter asked what China would have to do for the U.S. to reduce or lift tariffs, or loosen export controls. “I don’t expect that, for example, the phase one trade deal is going to be a major topic of conversation next week,” Sullivan said; instead, it will be more about geopolitical issues and human rights, not details on tariffs and export controls. “But we will communicate that the United States is going to take steps, in terms of what we do on technology, to ensure that our technology is not being used in ways that are inimical to our values or adverse to our security. We will communicate that message at a broad level,” he said. He added that before the U.S. can begin negotiating on trade, there's more work to do with allies, “to come up with a common approach, a joint approach, before we go sit down point by point with the Chinese government on these issues.”
The European Union published an official notice that it is lifting tariffs for four months, starting March 11. The EU was levying retaliatory tariffs of 15% on aircraft and 25% on rum, vodka, brandy, cheeses, potatoes, nuts, fruits, juices, chocolate, ketchup and agricultural equipment from the U.S.
Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, reintroduced a resolution that calls for revisions to the World Trade Organization while also affirming its usefulness. It is a repeat of a resolution introduced in 2020 (see 2007060004). “By identifying the problem and suggesting some potential solutions, this bipartisan resolution is a start to addressing and fixing some of the shortcomings of the WTO in order to support American workers against unfair foreign trade practices and enhance the ability of American farmers, workers, and businesses to access foreign markets,” Portman said in a news release announcing the March 9 introduction. Cardin said the U.S. must lead in maintaining rules-based systems, and reforms are needed for the WTO to succeed.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is seeking comments on the complaint that Hong Kong has raised at the World Trade Organization by April 12. The territory of Hong Kong has said that the U.S. is breaking WTO rules by requiring that exporters mark goods from Hong Kong as Made in China, rather than Made in Hong Kong. The U.S. issued an executive order last year making the change because of China's political crackdown against Hong Kong. The marking rule does not affect tariff treatment (see 2008130028).
The European Union and U.S. have moved closer to each other's positions on World Trade Organization reform, panelists on a webinar agreed, but that's not to say it's going to be quick or easy to get the appellate body restarted.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said that now that the tariffs are suspended in the Airbus-Boeing dispute, he's interested in seeing “how do the negotiations go? I said last week that I didn’t object to taking the tariffs off if we can get a solution to this thing that’s been going on for … years.” Grassley, a Senate Finance Committee member who was speaking to reporters on a conference call March 8, said he doesn't think the Senate will vote on Katherine Tai's confirmation for U.S. trade representative this week. “But she’s surely going to be done before Easter break,” he said.
The acting U.S. trade representative, María Pagán, said that after two years of negotiations at the World Trade Organization, the European Union has agreed to adjust its tariff rate quotas since Great Britain and Northern Ireland are no longer in the EU. “Once implemented, this agreement will provide market access certainty for U.S. producers and exporters to the EU,” Pagán said.