US, Vietnam Start Admitting New Agricultural Products From Each Other
The U.S. has started admitting star apples from Vietnam, and Vietnam has started accepting dried grains from the U.S., according to a Nov. 12 joint statement issued after President Donald Trump’s visit to the country. Trump and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang “pledged to deepen and expand the bilateral trade and investment relationship between the United States and Vietnam through formal mechanisms, including the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA),” the statement says. “They welcomed the return of market access for United States distillers dried grains into the Vietnamese market and new access for Vietnamese star apples into the United States market.”
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The two leaders committed to continue to seek resolution of remaining agricultural trade issues, including on siluriformes, shrimp and mangoes, and to promote “free and fair trade and investment” in “priority areas,” including automobiles, intellectual property rights and electronic payment services, the statement says. Trump and Quang also welcomed discussions between U.S. and Vietnamese companies on Vietnam’s imports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S.
In Nov. 12 remarks before a meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Trump said he was planning to focus on reducing the U.S.'s approximately $32 billion trade deficit with Vietnam. "We have to take care of our American companies and we have to take care of American workers. And perhaps the administrations previous to me didn’t like the subject, understand the subject -- something was wrong -- because there are so many problems having to do with trade imbalance. So we want to get that straightened out very quickly," Trump said. "We make the greatest missiles in the world, greatest planes in the world, greatest commercial aircraft in the world. So we would like Vietnam to buy from us, and we have to get rid of the trade imbalance. We can't have the trade imbalance."
During a joint press conference with Quang on Nov. 11, Trump said he is "encouraged" that Vietnam recently became the fastest-growing export market for the U.S. That press conference followed the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group's Leaders' Meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, during which Trump told his counterparts that that U.S. is going to "have much tougher trade policies now" because other APEC countries "have barriers. We don't," Trump said during a Nov. 11 press gaggle aboard Air Force One. "I'm not only talking about tariffs. They have non-tariff barriers, and we don't. I said, you got to remove them."