Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, in a bid to break the impasse in negotiations around the trade title in the China package, introduced a bill that would renew trade adjustment assistance and pass a limited trade promotion authority that could only be used for a free trade agreement with the U.K.
The published strategy to stop imports of goods with Xinjiang region content is lengthy, but it also shows how many blanks are left to be filled in. The rebuttable presumption that goods with a nexus to Xinjiang or Uyghur workers are banned took effect on June 21.
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.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said that he wants to get the conference negotiations done for the China package, because the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) has "some important trade aspects."
The National Council of Textile Organizations, the Narrow Fabrics Institute and the U.S. Industrial Fabrics Institute told the administration in response comments that if 7.5% Section 301 tariffs on apparel are lifted, it could risk "reversing once-in-a-lifetime nearshoring trends."
The Alliance for American Manufacturing told the administration that it's "absurd" to blame Section 301 tariffs for inflation, given they started years before inflation began to rise. "U.S. consumers would see little to no benefit from tariff roll backs and any erosion of tariffs will benefit China’s Communist Party and China’s manufacturing sector, which would make up the difference by increasing its prices," the group wrote. It said that all tariffs should remain. "AAM strongly supports allowing USTR to continue its fact-based exclusion process without congressional mandates or any other political interference that predetermines an outcome. While an accessible and transparent exclusion process is essential for trade enforcement actions, unwarranted tariff relief may very well signal the demise of a U.S. company that is seeking to establish a market foothold or one that has reinvented itself to fill gaps in our domestic supply chains," it wrote.
A new bill directs the administration to open a Section 301 investigation "to determine whether acts, policies, and practices of the Government of the People's Republic of China related to technology transfer, intellectual property, or innovation with respect to rare earth metal mining, separation, metallization, alloying, or magnet manufacturing, or related processes, are acts, policies, and practices" are damaging enough to the U.S. economy that they necessitate "trade enforcement actions to deter the Government of the People's Republic of China from further interference in the rare earth metals market."
The Ocean Shipping Reform Act, which would punish carriers who reject exports from West Coast ports if the Federal Maritime Commission deems those decisions as unreasonable, was signed into law June 16. The FMC is directed to begin a rulemaking on the matter. The law also puts the burden of proof on the reasonableness of demurrage and detention fees on ocean carriers, rather than the parties who were charged the fees.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told an audience at the American Association of Exporters and Importers conference June 15 that his discussion draft of a Customs modernization bill elicited some consternation, but that it was shared because he was trying to figure out "how do we get stakeholders in a good place so that we can have a customs modernization package?"
A new report from Sheffield Hallam University researchers alleges that about 25% of flooring sold in the U.S. includes PVC, a type of plastic, made in China, and that "the lion's share" of the resins come from China's Xinjiang Uyghur region.