U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is meeting with his counterparts from Japan and other countries, letting them know that the United States is willing to talk about bilateral trade deals.
Lighthizer flew this week to Hanoi to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting of trade ministers. It was there that he sat down for separate talks with officials from Japan and more than a dozen other countries about the possibilities for bilateral trade deals.
“For the most part, I was there to show that we want to engage,” Lighthizer told reporters after he and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue briefed House Agriculture Committee members on a wide range of trade issues. “It was very important that the United States show that we’re engaged.”
The American Farm Bureau Federation had estimated that tariff cuts agreed to in the TPP would net farmers an extra $4.4 billion annually. Increased access to Japan’s market was one of the biggest gains that farm groups had been counting on in TPP, but Lighthizer said it is still unclear how interested the Japanese are in a bilateral deal.
“Right now we have to see if Japan wants to negotiate or do they want to try something else,” Lighthizer said. “There are a bunch of thorny issues we have to work with. The elephant in the room is, ‘Do we do a bilateral?’ They have to work their way through their own politics.”
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway said that he wants to see trade deals with a lot more countries. “The next step … would be starting these bilateral agreements with the 11 TPP countries,” Conaway said. “Much of the ground work with those 11 countries – Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Peru, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei – is already done and that should make the process easier,” Lighthizer said. “Clearly, we want to start with what was done,” he said. “A lot of good work was done in TPP. We want to use that.”
