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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Saturday, April 20, 2024
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has described the upcoming meeting with her Mexican and Canadian counterparts as a friendly-sounding “annual get-together,” but it’s also expected to be a showdown over contentious issues that have put the three countries at odds.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai promised lawmakers Wednesday that work has begun to work out trade disputes with the European Union and the UK to create what President Joe Biden calls “a united front of U.S. allies,” but she largely left questions about China unanswered as the U.S. continues to study the situation.
Lawmakers, lobbyists and farm groups are anxious for the Biden administration to take its first concrete steps to begin negotiating international trade agreements and reform at the World Trade Organization to improve international access for U.S. goods as well as rein in China’s expanding global influence.
Farm groups are bracing for President Joe Biden to propose higher taxes on inherited assets and capital gains this week, while the Supreme Court takes up the authority of EPA to exempt refiners from biofuel usage requirements.
The U.S. was one of nine countries critical of the European Union last year when it unveiled a plan to tax imports based on their carbon footprint, but that was under the Trump administration. Now the Biden administration is signaling a stronger kinship to the EU’s push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on an international scale.
Robert Bonnie has been tapped to be the next USDA undersecretary for farm production and conservation programs, and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai appoints Elizabeth Baltzan as a senior adviser.
Some of the most vocal criticisms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement was that it did not include provisions to address climate change. It’s a view that U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Thursday that she shares and went on to provide rationale for making environmental protection a much bigger factor in future of trade policy.
Mexico’s Supreme Court refused last week for the second time in six weeks to make a ruling that could allow substantial new access to the Mexican market worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually for U.S. potatoes, fueling Mexican farmers' determination to continue their fight against the trade.
U.S. farmers, government officials and academics told the International Trade Commission that unfair Mexican trade had caused steep losses in domestic vegetable markets, an accusation countered by representatives of Mexican exporters.
New regulations in Mexico threaten to disrupt more than $100 million in organic food trade with the U.S., and the Biden administration has less than three months to address the situation before the requirements take effect.
