U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced May 5 that the U.S. will support an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines, but cautioned that negotiating the language in Geneva will take time, because of the need for consensus at the World Trade Organization, and because of the “complexity of the issues.” Top Democrats in Congress welcomed the announcement. Tai also said the administration will work to increase production of raw materials for vaccines, which has been the constraint so far for Indian vaccine manufacturers. Pfizer has expressed interest in manufacturing in India if it would speed approval of its vaccine; India currently does not allow imports of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
Angela Ellard, chief Republican trade counsel on the House Ways and Means Committee, will be one of the four deputy directors-general at the World Trade Organization, Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala announced May 4. Ellard has served on the committee staff since 1995.
With the administration's desire to address root causes for migration from Central American countries, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the free trade agreement that covers that region, and the Dominican Republic, has been “very much on my mind recently.”
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.