Trade ministers meeting at the World Trade Organization in Geneva agreed to a partial solution to harmful subsidies for fishing fleets, an intellectual property waiver for Covid vaccines, and to allow sale of commodities to the World Food Program even if the product is otherwise subject to export restrictions. The countries that attended the ministerial conference also agreed to extend the moratorium on tariffs on electronic transmissions.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
A top official in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said that opposition to extending a moratorium on tariffs on sales of intangible goods has surfaced before, but that the e-commerce moratorium has been renewed at every World Trade Organization ministerial conference since 1998. "There are a few countries, despite benefiting from e-commerce and digital trade, who continue to resist an extension of the moratorium," she said, but most countries, including in the developing world, see the tariff-free status as important.
A week before U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai heads to Geneva for the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference, she said she's excited for what the meeting could bring, though she avoided predicting that either an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines would be approved, or that the 20-year fisheries negotiations would be closed.
Even if the Commerce Department finds that solar panels from Southeast Asia are circumventing antidumping and countervailing duty actions against Chinese exports, no AD/CVD will be collected for the next two years, the Biden administration announced on June 6. Trade lawyers were astonished by the action, which is based on the authority to temporarily suspend AD/CVD when imports are needed to respond to natural disasters "or other emergencies."
A group of lawmakers is calling the outcry around the anticircumvention case on solar panels made in Southeast Asia "an attempt to undermine the integrity of our trade enforcement laws and the independence of our federal workforce."
As companies work to move assembly out of China so that the goods they export to the U.S. won't be hit with Section 301 tariffs, they have to grapple with the fact that CBP may still consider a good made in Mexico, Malaysia, Vietnam or elsewhere to be a product of China if enough of its innards were made in China.
Although utilities that are installing wind and solar operations and wind turbine manufacturers would like antidumping duty and countervailing duty laws to change to take public interest into account, panelists at Georgetown Law's International Trade Update acknowledged it will probably never happen.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is continuing to get criticism about the solar circumvention investigation, this time both from Republicans and Democrats, as she testified again in front of a Senate committee. She said that while she is not saying if the circumvention investigation will result in a finding, she wanted to address rhetoric that says the large majority of imported solar panels could be subject to a 200% tariff. On one company, it could actually be 270% (see 2205040015).
Senators said that officials from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative failed to consult properly before a proposal to make changes to the TRIPS Agreement regarding coronavirus vaccines was released, and that the agency's approach needs to change. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and ranking member Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, led a letter, which said: "Administrations of both parties have struggled to comply with the terms Congress has provided to ensure its views are reflected in our trade policy. Accordingly, we request that you take steps to ensure Congress is a full partner in the Administration’s ongoing trade negotiations, regardless of whether the Administration believes any eventual agreement from such negotiations will require formal Congressional approval. To that end, the Office of the United States Trade Representative ... must provide Congress with timely, substantive briefings on negotiations and share all U.S. negotiating texts before the Administration commits the United States to a particular negotiating position or outcome."
A third of the Senate's Democratic caucus asked President Joe Biden to expedite an investigation into antidumping duty and countervailing duty circumvention by solar panel manufacturers in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, if they use Chinese components. The letter, made public May 3, was led by Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who made the same arguments when Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo appeared before the Commerce Committee.