Any future Section 301 exclusion renewals will only last until the end of the year, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told the House Ways and Means Committee as he testified June 17 about the administration's trade agenda, adding that “they will decide what happens after that.”
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.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, rejected a compromise position that the United Kingdom reportedly is considering -- ending its ban on U.S. hormone-treated beef and chlorinated chicken, but taxing those imports, and letting food that meets U.K. standards in without a duty. He said the British negotiators believe that this bifurcated approach will encourage U.S. producers to “change our farming practices. But it’s another way of being very protectionist,” he told reporters on a June 16 call. “Agriculture's going to be tough,” he said.
Importers may want to delay filing for U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement reconciliation because the USMCA currently doesn't allow for post-entry refunds of merchandise processing fees, CBP officials said during a National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones webinar on June 16. Maya Kamar, CBP director for textiles and trade agreements, said that although the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is working with Congress for a legislative fix to the issue, CBP doesn't yet have clarity on whether such a bill will pass (see 2006050034).
China could and should be buying more U.S. products, according to a letter Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., sent to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, asking him what he's intending to do about it. Scott cited research from the Peterson Institute for International Economics that shows China, through April 2020, has purchased roughly 45 percent of what it promised, if purchases were to build at the same pace through the remainder of this year.
Clete Willems, former White House deputy assistant to the president for international economics, believes the U.S. must convince allies to present a unified front to China on industrial subsidies, censorship and cybersecurity issues. Willems, who is now a lobbyist with Akin Gump, was speaking during a June 12 online program of the Asia Society. When it's just the U.S. arguing for reforms, he said, China can portray it as the U.S. trying to keep China down. But, he said, it might be possible to get China to change, “if we are able to portray them as an international outlier, which I think they are.”
The negotiations toward a U.S.-United Kingdom trade agreement, which are happening online, are starting with the commonalities, but Britain's North American trade commissioner and consul general in New York said he thinks they will be able to find a way forward even on the sensitive issues in agriculture.
While most of the focus on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement has been on the changes to the auto rules of origin and enforcement measures aimed at Mexico, Crowell & Moring lawyers explained that importers and exporters of textiles and chemicals also can take advantage of rules that changed from NAFTA for inclusion in the updated agreement.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, a House Ways and Means Committee member who also leads on trade in the New Democrats, said she's worried that the participation of “so many countries” at the World Trade Organization in e-commerce talks -- including China -- will mean that the result will not be a high-standard agreement.
The European Union is talking about including a carbon tax on imports as it comes out of the COVID-19-driven recession, and Russia, the U.S. and China asked about these plans at a World Trade Organization meeting June 8, wondering if such a tariff could be levied within the WTO rules. Russia asked what sectors would be subject to the tax, and why, and asked if the EU is hoping to protect the steel industry under the pretext of fighting climate change.
Germany is benefiting from both its use of partial unemployment and its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and manufacturers in electronics, machinery and equipment and the auto sector are back to pre-crisis levels, according to Ludovic Subran, chief economist of Allianz. Subran, who was speaking on a June 9 webinar on globalization hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said German firms will have an edge over those in other countries that didn't keep workers employed during the shutdown measures taken to control the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.