The U.K. and India last month held their 12th round of negotiations on a free trade agreement to discuss “ways to progress” the talks, the U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade said in a Sept. 1 news release. The two sides plan to hold another round of negotiations this month. They began the talks in 2022 (see 2201130026) and had hoped to conclude a majority of the negotiations by the end of last year (see 2208110014).

Although the office of the U.S. Representative has already received nearly 1,500 comments on "worker-centered trade," the office has re-opened comments that closed Aug. 11. It is now accepting ideas on trade policies and actions to advance racial and gender equity, advance equity for rural communities or other underserved categories, as well as ideas on how to advance these values through stakeholder engagement.

India's Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal told U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai that he will "find a solution that addresses both countries' concerns" when it comes to India's new import licensing regime for technology imports. The new system is supposed to go into effect Nov. 1; U.S. technology companies have said it will hurt their exports to India (see 2308170028).

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, after a meeting with European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis in Jaipur, India, said she and her EU counterpart asked their negotiating teams to hold sessions on both a global arrangement on sustainable steel and aluminum and on a critical minerals agreement "with an intensified pace."

The fifth negotiating round for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will be held Sept. 10-16 in Thailand, the administration announced Aug. 10. The supply chains chapter is complete, but negotiators will be talking about trade issues, the green transition and anticorruption matters. The U.S. delegation is led by Sharon Yuan, a counselor at Commerce, and Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Sarah Ellerman, whose portfolio is Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department is responsible for three of the four pillars in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, told a think tank audience that she is "determined to finalize agreements with all of these countries on all three pillars I’m managing" by a summit at the end of November. The IPEF, which does not liberalize tariffs but does seek to lower non-tariff barriers in its trade pillar, also includes a tax and anti-corruption pillar, an infrastructure and decarbonization pillar, and a supply chain pillar, which was already agreed to earlier this year.

A readout from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative after the latest round of talks between the trade representative and her EU counterpart on a steel and aluminum deal suggested she does not think the EU is thinking big enough. The U.S. and the EU are trying to agree on a system that would preference steel and aluminum made with a lower carbon footprint, and, at the same time, a system that would keep metals produced through non-market excess capacity out of their countries.

The fourth round of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) concluded in South Korea last week, and the Commerce Department and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said the countries' delegations "continued to make progress" toward the trade, clean economy and fair economy pillars, and advanced the legal review of the supply chain pillar.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced that USTR Katherine Tai will travel to Brussels July 20-21, on her way back from Kenya.

The EU and Australia were unable to finalize negotiations on a planned free trade deal this week, a European Commission spokesperson said July 11, adding that “more work is required to address key outstanding issues.” Miriam Garcia Ferrer, the commission’s spokesperson for trade, said there were “several issues on which the Australian side required further internal consultations” but said both sides will “continue to work on bridging remaining gaps.”