The Aluminum Association, which represents 120 companies, including the largest U.S. smelter, Alcoa, is pushing back against a call for Canada to again be subject to Section 232 tariffs on the metal The American Primary Aluminum Association's letter to the U.S. Trade Representative asked for the return of a 10% tariff on Canadian aluminum. The group pointed to the closure of a Washington state Alcoa smelter as a reason to reimpose the tariffs.
Clete Willems, former White House deputy assistant to the president for international economics, believes the U.S. must convince allies to present a unified front to China on industrial subsidies, censorship and cybersecurity issues. Willems, who is now a lobbyist with Akin Gump, was speaking during a June 12 online program of the Asia Society. When it's just the U.S. arguing for reforms, he said, China can portray it as the U.S. trying to keep China down. But, he said, it might be possible to get China to change, “if we are able to portray them as an international outlier, which I think they are.”
The American Apparel and Footwear Association is asking Congress to renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act this year, five years ahead of its expiration. “Companies are poised to diversify out of China, and Africa is a logical place for many of them. The on-again, off-again nature of the program before the ten-year renewal was extremely disruptive and meant the industry was not able to take full advantage of the first 15 years of the program,” AAFA's letter said. The trade organization is also asking that the quota limit for third country fabric be increased from 3.5% to at least 4%, with a growth provision.
While most of the focus on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement has been on the changes to the auto rules of origin and enforcement measures aimed at Mexico, Crowell & Moring lawyers explained that importers and exporters of textiles and chemicals also can take advantage of rules that changed from NAFTA for inclusion in the updated agreement.
The negotiations toward a U.S.-United Kingdom trade agreement, which are happening online, are starting with the commonalities, but Britain's North American trade commissioner and consul general in New York said he thinks they will be able to find a way forward even on the sensitive issues in agriculture.
China asked the U.S. to clarify how it defines “foreign adversaries” named in the May executive order that bans the use of some bulk power equipment and parts from foreign adversaries (see 2005040040). It suggested, during a June 10 World Trade Organization meeting, that the U.S. could be abusing the national security exception to the WTO rules. The U.S. replied that because the restriction pertains to national security, it should not be open to discussion at all, according to a Geneva trade official.
The second round of comment collections on retaliatory tariffs in the Airbus agreement should be free-form, as the first set was, the National Association of Beverage Importers said in June 9 comments to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The trade group said the fact that almost 26,000 comments were submitted in the last round shows strong public interest, and the pull-down menus in the online form that the USTR has offered is confusing. “The form portal approach does not minimize the burden on the public; rather, it reduces the review burden on USTR. The latter is not the goal of the Paperwork Reduction Act,” NABI President Robert Tobiassen said. The association “respectfully requests that the existing process is maintained as it is, and that this emergency information collection request be approved only as a non-mandatory option for those who are willing and able to provide the information in the format USTR is seeking to receive,” it said. The USTR requested comments about the coming portal changes last month (see 2005260026).
Rep. Suzan DelBene, a House Ways and Means Committee member who also leads on trade in the New Democrats, said she's worried that the participation of “so many countries” at the World Trade Organization in e-commerce talks -- including China -- will mean that the result will not be a high-standard agreement.
Germany is benefiting from both its use of partial unemployment and its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and manufacturers in electronics, machinery and equipment and the auto sector are back to pre-crisis levels, according to Ludovic Subran, chief economist of Allianz. Subran, who was speaking on a June 9 webinar on globalization hosted by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said German firms will have an edge over those in other countries that didn't keep workers employed during the shutdown measures taken to control the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The Aluminum Extruders Council pointed to the closure of Alcoa's Intalco Works in Ferndale, Washington, as proof that Section 232 is not helping the aluminum industry, and said that since there is no longer a source of domestic billets west of the Mississippi River, they have to import. But both domestic and foreign supply of aluminum billets is more expensive than it would be in other countries, so domestic extruders are at a price disadvantage. Exporters circumvent Section 232 -- which covers aluminum extrusions -- by doing further fabricating of the extrusions and classifying them under a subheading not covered in Section 232, the group said. “The truth is, no one is going to build primary aluminum production in the U.S. with or without the 232,” the group said in a June 9 press release. “It is time for the Administration to re-examine its policy in this area. We applaud their goal. We really do. However, the path they have taken has been proven to be ineffective, and ultimately counterproductive.”