U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai generally avoided being pinned down on timing as she was asked about rekindling trade negotiations with the United Kingdom and Kenya, the pause on tariffs on European imports, and a solution for steel overcapacity that could make way for the lifting of Section 232 tariffs.
Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade economist and top official for 20 years, will be leading the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which is involved in both enforcement of the USMCA labor chapter and in investigating forced labor and the worst forms of child labor. The AFL-CIO reacted to the news of her appointment by saying “there is no better person to help strengthen enforcement of labor standards that increase the power of workers in the U.S. and around the world. She will also help shape policies to end forced labor and egregious worker rights violations throughout global supply chains.” The job is not one that requires Senate confirmation.
Uyghur Human Rights Project Board Chair Nury Turkel told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his nonprofit wants swift passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would create a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang province were made with forced labor. "The 11 current Withhold-release orders (WROs) are a wholly inadequate response to the gravity of the crimes, the harm to American workers whose wages are undercut by forced-labor competition, and the unwitting complicity of American consumers who buy face masks, hair weaves, cotton apparel, and solar panels produced by the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs," he said in his prepared testimony.
One Democrat and one Republican from each chamber sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, asking the administration to reexamine the decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, a decision they called “misguided and short-sighted.” The May 5 letter, led by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, a close ally to President Joe Biden, also acknowledged that “there are significant political obstacles to negotiating an agreement to rejoin the TPP in its current form.” But Carper, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said there should be an effort to determine the best course for engagement with the countries that continued on without the U.S. to see how they could build on recent trade agreements.
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.