One of the nominees for director general of the World Trade Organization, Hamid Mamdouh, told the Washington International Trade Association that the failings of the appellate body are because the WTO has abandoned negotiations. This is the same view held by the U.S., which has brought the issue to a head by killing the appellate body. Mamdouh, a senior counsel at King & Spalding, was speaking during a WITA webinar June 23.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said that there's “a good chance” that the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, will be renewed in Congress before it expires at the end of the year. He said to International Trade Today that the only controversy around GSP is that India was removed because it wasn't “living up to other things we want.”
Of the 52,746 exclusion requests related to Section 301 tariffs, 75.4% have been denied, and 12.3% are still under review, a new Congressional Research Service report says. Because most exclusions are for specific products, and don't cover an entire Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading number, it's not possible to know how much trade is covered by the exclusions, CRS said. The report noted that some Congress members complain about the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative picking winners and losers, while others feel any exclusion undermines the ability of Section 301 to address China's unfair trade practices.
Generally, an entry is liquidated after 314 days, but Geodis customs brokers told an audience of fashion industry professionals that there have been cases in which liquidation came early, and there was not enough time left to do a protest in order to get a refund after an exclusion was granted. The brokers spoke during a webinar hosted by the U.S. Fashion Industry Association.
Everett Eissenstat, senior vice president of global public policy at General Motors, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the stricter rules of origin in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement won't “change the whole dynamic” of siting decisions but will be taken into consideration.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told two senators concerned about retaliatory tariffs in India that the U.S. is working on restoring India to the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, but that it's slow going. “We’re in the process of restoring it if we can get an adequate counterbalancing proposal from them,” he told Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who had complained that American apples are now taxed at 70% in India because of Section 232 tariffs on metals from that country.
Rep. Xochitl Torres-Small, D-N.M., and Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, introduced a bill June 8 that would extend the limits on importing Russian uranium.
Lawmakers should act quickly to renew the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program before it expires at the end of 2020, more than 200 companies and trade associations said in a June 16 letter to the leaders of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees. “Further uncertainty about whether companies will have to pay millions of dollars a day in new taxes in January 2021 is the last thing the American business community needs,” they said.
Any future Section 301 exclusion renewals will only last until the end of the year, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told the House Ways and Means Committee as he testified June 17 about the administration's trade agenda, adding that “they will decide what happens after that.”
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, rejected a compromise position that the United Kingdom reportedly is considering -- ending its ban on U.S. hormone-treated beef and chlorinated chicken, but taxing those imports, and letting food that meets U.K. standards in without a duty. He said the British negotiators believe that this bifurcated approach will encourage U.S. producers to “change our farming practices. But it’s another way of being very protectionist,” he told reporters on a June 16 call. “Agriculture's going to be tough,” he said.