Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., joined by three Democrats and two Republicans, introduced a bill in March that asks the administration to develop a strategy to increase exports to African countries by 200% in real dollars within 10 years of the bill's passage into law. The bill's text was published May 1. To achieve this goal, the bill suggests the administration help U.S. businesses with expertise in energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, technology and agriculture develop relationships with African governments. It also said the U.S. should promote economic integration in Africa, including the development of customs unions between western and central Africa and eastern and southern Africa “eliminating time-consuming border formalities into and within these areas, and supporting regionally based infrastructure projects.”
In an annual report about intellectual property challenges around the globe, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative praised progress at the United Arab Emirates, and repeated concerns about dozens of countries' weak enforcement and policies it says are barriers to U.S. businesses. China, India, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Venezuela spent another year on the USTR's "priority watch list" for intellectual property violations, while Algeria moved to the lower-intensity "watch list."
Former U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization Dennis Shea says a planned discussion at the WTO about matters that affect trade in cotton “must examine the trade impact of the use of forced labor to pick cotton in China’s Xinjiang province.” Shea, who was writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is now an adjunct fellow, said “ignoring what is happening in Xinjiang would be tantamount to the WTO holding a meeting on global public health and trade without mentioning the Covid-19 pandemic. ... The use of forced labor in the province has likely depressed the global price of cotton, adversely impacted other cotton-exporting nations (particularly those in the developing world) and improperly distorted global trade flows,” and may even be a countervailable subsidy. Shea said the U.S. should raise the issue during the late May meeting.
Celeste Drake, who often opposed trade agreements in her eight years leading trade and globalization policy at the AFL-CIO, was named Made in America director, a new job at the Office of Management and Budget. Most recently, she was a top lobbyist at the Directors Guild of America. The Biden administration said Drake “will shape and implement Federal procurement and financial management policy to help carry out the President’s vision of a future made in all of America by all of America’s workers -- including minority entrepreneurs and small businesses in every region in our country.”
The U.S. praised Vietnam for its role in the World Trade Organization fisheries negotiations and its fight against transshipment, but said it has concerns about sanitary and phytosanitary measures in Vietnam that in the U.S. view are unwarranted barriers to trade.
Even as the U.S. and the European Union work privately to resolve their differences over subsidies to Airbus and Boeing, a U.S. representative at the World Trade Organization complained that the EU provided no status update on coming into compliance over Airbus subsidies. The EU said that the measures it took in August 2020 (see 2008280051) were more than enough to comply with a WTO ruling, according to a Geneva trade official.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai heard many bipartisan complaints about the pain of both Section 301 tariffs and Europe's retaliatory tariffs in response to steel tariffs, but stood her ground on both during a hearing in front of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for funding the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
At a webinar on U.S.-Vietnam economic relations, Ambassador Ha Kim Ngoc said Vietnam is working to narrow the trade deficit with the U.S., whether by buying more American agricultural exports or encouraging Vietnamese businesses to open factories in the U.S. "I don’t think we can solve the problem overnight, with COVID-19 and the increased demand of the goods from Southeast Asia, and particularly Vietnam," he said April 27.
The U.S. should lead the charge to reopen the Environmental Goods Agreement in Geneva, House Ways and Means Republicans wrote April 22, on Earth Day. This follows a resolution introduced earlier in the month by four pro-trade Democrats calling for the same thing (see 2104080050).
Clete Willems, a former Donald Trump administration trade staffer, told the Senate Finance Committee that technology sales to China help pay for research and development here, so as Congress considers how to bolster the semiconductor industry, it should also be sure not to put export controls on goods that are not sensitive.