The U.S. and the United Kingdom completed a fourth round of free trade agreement negotiations last week and have moved into the “advanced stages” in most areas, the U.K.’s Department for International Trade said Sept. 22. The two sides “exchanged their first tariff offers” before the fourth round began, leading to “detailed market access discussions” during the round of negotiations. “Significant progress has been achieved since launching negotiations,” the agency said, calling the exchange of tariff offers a “notable milestone.” The U.K. said “the speed at which this stage has been reached demonstrates the momentum behind these negotiations.” The two sides plan to hold the fifth round of talks in mid- to late October, the U.K. said, again with discussions taking place before it begins. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not comment.

Trade ministers from the G-20 nations said they will continue to support reform of the World Trade Organization and restoration of a functioning dispute settlement system, and that they recognize how important it is that any trade measures related to COVID-19 are “targeted, proportionate, transparent [and] temporary,” and don't create unnecessary disruption to global supply chains. The statement was released Sept. 22, at the end of a virtual G-20 summit.

Liam Fox, from the United Kingdom; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from Nigeria; Yoo Myung-hee from Korea; Amina C. Mohamed from Kenya; and Mohammad Maziad Al-Tuwaijri from Saudi Arabia are the candidates still in the running for the director-general position at the World Trade Organization, after the first round of winnowing. The second round of winnowing will be done with member states from Sept. 24 to Oct. 6. The second round will narrow the list to two candidates. After this, the timeline for the third round, to select the one candidate by consensus, will be announced.

European Union Director General for Trade Sabine Weyand said the EU has made another offer to settle the Boeing-Airbus dispute. “There's a lot we need to do to calm down the tensions in our relationship,” she said during a Sept. 15 webinar hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She pointed to the deal on lobster tariffs as good but small. “It's the first tariff liberalization we have done in 20 years” between the U.S. and EU, she noted.

A new World Trade Organization dispute settlement panel report said that the U.S. improperly applied Section 301 tariffs on goods from China. “It remains to be seen whether the US decides to appeal the ruling,” former WTO official Peter Ungphakorn said in a tweet. “Since the Appellate Body cannot function, this would be an 'appeal into the void.'” The WTO appeals court is mostly inoperable due to a U.S. hold on adding new members.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Japan's Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Mogi talked about the necessity of dispute settlement reform at the World Trade Organization, Japan said in an Aug. 26 press release, according to an unofficial translation. The release emphasized that the U.S. initiated the call, and said the need for reform is becoming more urgent.

During the monthly Dispute Settlement Body meeting at the World Trade Organization, the European Union said it adopted “additional and extraordinary” compliance measures by withdrawing all the remaining subsidies for Airbus on Aug. 21, and they said that was “substantially in excess” of what's required by the WTO rules. They said they did this in order to convince the U.S. to withdraw its tariffs on European goods, and with the intention that they would not impose tariffs over Boeing subsidies, after a negotiated settlement. “It is not in the interests of anyone that the European Union and the United States now proceed to, or continue, mutually assured retaliation, and certainly not in the current economic climate,” they said.

Moldova's Tudor Ulianovschi told the Washington International Trade Association that the fact that he's coming from a neutral country is an advantage in his candidacy for director-general of the World Trade Organization. Ulianovschi, who was speaking Aug. 26 on a WITA webinar, served as foreign minister of Moldova in 2018 and 2019, and during that time Moldova became a member of the WTO government procurement agreement.

The World Trade Organization largely sided with Canada in finding that the Commerce Department miscalculated government support for softwood lumber exporters, both by using Nova Scotia benchmarks to apply to companies in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Québec, and by deciding that the sawmills were being sold electricity at below-market rates.

The Aug. 28 meeting of the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body in Geneva will include the European Union's arguments that with Airbus launch subsidies resolved, the billions of dollars in tariffs on French wine, Airbus planes, Scottish whisky and other products should be lifted. The U.S. will also weigh in.