Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he's been told it's going to take three or four days for six other Senate committees to clear the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement so that it can go to the floor for a vote. Whether it can come up the week of Jan. 21 will depend on whether the articles of impeachment have arrived by then, he noted.
Exports to China
The government of Canada issued the following trade-related notices as of Jan. 8 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for Dec. 30 - Jan. 3 in case you missed them.
Australian exporters will see significant benefits from the recent round of tariff cuts as part of the country’s free trade deals with South Korea and China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Australia’s trade minister said Jan. 1. Several rounds of tariff cuts took effect at the start of 2020 for Australian exporters, the minister said, including reduced tariff rates for exports of milk powders, goat meat, oranges, shelled almonds and skin care products into China. Tariffs will also be reduced on lamb exports to South Korea and beef exports to Mexico, Australia said.
China has no plans to adjust its import quotas for wheat, corn and rice despite an agreement with the U.S. to increase purchases of U.S. agricultural products (see 1912130035), according to an unofficial translation of a Jan. 7 report from Caixin, a Chinese financial news site. Han Jun, China’s vice minister of agricultural and rural affairs, called the import quotas a “global” quota, and said China “will not adjust for one country,” according to the report. The comments come as China’s Commerce Ministry remains vague about its plans to purchase U.S. agricultural goods despite reports that China plans to issue tariff exemptions to importers of U.S. agricultural goods more frequently (see 1912170030). The U.S. and China plan to sign phase one of the agreement Jan. 15 (see 1912310010)
President Donald Trump threatened sanctions against Iraq following a Jan. 5 vote by the country's parliament to expel U.S. troops. The threat comes amid growing tension in the Middle East as Iran further decommitted from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and Europe scrambled to keep the deal from disintegrating, which could trigger European snapback sanctions against Iran.
The Trump administration successfully persuaded the Dutch government to not renew an export license for a Dutch chip manufacturer, which was poised to sell the technology to China, according to a Jan. 6 Reuters report. The administration “mounted an extensive campaign” to block the sale, which included lobbying from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House officials, who shared “classified intelligence” with the Netherlands’ prime minister, Reuters said. The campaign began in 2018 after the Netherlands granted an export license to ASML, a semiconductor equipment company, to sell “its most advanced machine” to a Chinese customer.
China recently announced it will renew a program offering full value-added tax refunds on “domestic equipment purchases” by certain approved mainland companies and “foreign invested” research and development centers, according to a Jan. 3 report from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. The foreign-invested companies must be approved by China’s Commerce Ministry, the report said. The VAT program will continue until Dec. 31, 2020.
China’s General Administration of Customs issued its “Customs Certified Enterprise Standards” for cross-border e-commerce “platform enterprises” and “express carrier operators,” China said in a notice released Dec. 31, according to an unofficial translation. The standards, which take effect March 1, must be adhered to by any cross-border e-commerce platform enterprise that applies for the application of customs certification enterprise management.
Brazil is poised to overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading soybean producer during the 2019-2020 season, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service report released Jan. 2. Although USDA predicts Brazil’s soybean exports will remain about the same compared with the previous year, an “emerging trade truce” between the U.S. and China as a result of the two sides’ phase one deal (see 1912310010) is “almost certain” to dent Brazilian soybean exports and lower the country’s soybean prices. “Brazil will lose some portion of its China export share to the United States” due to the deal, the report said. The Brazilian reaction to the initial U.S.-China trade deal has been “muted” even though it will likely cut into Brazil's agricultural exports, the USDA said. Because the details of the deal are not yet clear and due to other factors affecting U.S. soybean crop yields, most Brazilian soybean exporters have “adopted a wait-and-see approach,” the report said.