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With help from Ximena Bustillo, Doug Palmer and Barbara Moens
— The semiconductor manufacturing funds in Congress’s anti-China competitiveness legislation will give the federal government a chance to diversify a sector that has lagged in Black and Latino employment.
— Congress and the White House are considering unprecedented federal controls over American investments in China, through both the anti-China bill and potential executive orders.
— And a coalition of business groups is pushing the Biden administration to pursue ambitious trade provisions in its proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — more ambitious than the White House has signaled.
It’s Tuesday, Feb. 22. Welcome to Weekly Trade. Send us your news: [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].
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WILL THE CHIPS BILL INCREASE INDUSTRY DIVERSITY?: Black workers account for just 4 percent of employment in the U.S. semiconductor industry, compared to 10 percent in manufacturing and around 12 percent in the overall workforce.
But with Congress on the verge of approving $52 billion to help boost the U.S. share of global semiconductor production, the trade team’s Doug Palmer reports that industry and the federal government have a rare opportunity to reshape the sector.
“Companies who are looking to hire a larger and more diverse workforce need to shift their workplaces toward more equitable and inclusive spaces or these new workers will not feel welcome,” Shari Liss, executive director of the SEMI Foundation, testified at a recent hearing held by the House Science subcommittee on research and technology
Geographically, nearly two-thirds of the industry workforce is located in four states: California, Texas, Oregon and Arizona. And in three of those states – California, Oregon and Arizona – the Black share of the population is well below the national level of 13.4 percent.
6.5 percent of the population in California is Black, and the state accounts for 23 percent of the employment in the industry. The Black percentage of the population is even lower in Arizona (5.2 percent) and Oregon (2.2 percent.)
However, Intel’s plan to build a new plant in Ohio is one step that could improve the national picture, given it’s higher Black population, at 13.1 percent. Read more from Doug’s report here.
CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE CONSIDER CHINA INVESTMENT OVERSIGHT: Congress and the White House are considering new moves to increase federal oversight of U.S. investments in China, your host reported Friday — moves that could amount to unprecedented regulation of supply chains and capital flows into the world’s second largest economy.
China bill showdown: As regular readers know, the House’s anti-China package includes a bill to set up a new interagency commission to screen American investments in China across an array of key industries, from tech to energy and defense. That will be a key sticking point in the coming conference committee that will produce a final bill.
Executive orders mulled: But that bill has already been delayed multiple times by corporate opposition. That has the White House mulling action on its own — with potential executive orders to increase oversight of American banks investing in Chinese startups and tech firms.
“As part of our thinking about competition with China, we’ve been looking at what kind of technology and capital flows to China are, and where there might be gaps in existing regimes,” said a senior administration official, who spoke anonymously to detail administration plans. “No decisions have been made. If there is a new review mechanism, it would be designed to avoid unintended consequences.”
MAY MEETING FOR TTC IN FRANCE: The U.S. and EU will convene the second meeting of their new Trade and Technology Council May 15-16 in France, the EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said Monday.
The first meeting, late last September in Pittsburgh, was nearly derailed over French anger at a U.S.-Australia defense pact that sunk a major French submarine contract. With discord over that deal largely subsided, the sides are expected to move ahead with negotiations on aligning their policies in technology areas such as microchips, robots and artificial intelligence. Though talks between the two sides have been ongoing for a while, several European trade officials told POLITICO Europe that the real work is yet to begin. It’s one of the topics that U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who is in France and Germany this week, will discuss with her European counterparts.
INDUSTRY GROUPS PUSH TRADE PROVISIONS IN INDO-PACIFIC FRAMEWORK: Groups including the Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers are pushing the White House to negotiate a wide-ranging deal that includes enforceable technology and agriculture standards and new market access opportunities in a letter.
“A successful trade module of the IPEF should include commitments across the manufacturing, agriculture, and services sectors,” the groups wrote. “These should include trade facilitation, good regulatory practices, sanitary and phyto-sanitary rules, technical barriers to trade, intellectual property rights protection, and anti-corruption, among other state-of-the-art provisions from recent agreements.”
That sounds significantly more ambitious than the Biden Administration’s approach to date, which has emphasized to allies that the framework is “not a free trade deal” and “will not include new market access commitments.” But those negotiations are still in their early stages.
USDA TRADE DELEGATION TO DUBAI: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack traveled to Dubai over the weekend for the first in-person USDA international trade mission in two years.
Foreign Agricultural Service Administrator Daniel Whitley was joined by Vilsack over the weekend along with representatives from nearly 40 U.S. agribusinesses, farm groups and state departments of agriculture, who are interested in exploring new export opportunities with the UAE.
Along for the ride was a Minnesota trade delegation, eight state departments of agriculture and 25 U.S. companies. The mission engaged with 71 regional buyers, including the Fresh Fruit Trading Company and the Al Douri group, and underwent 300 business meetings.
USDA will check back with the participants in August to inquire how many leads and sales resulted from the trade mission.
“We had a number of minority owned companies, veteran owned companies, women owned companies that had not traded or exported before but were interested in doing so,” Vilsack told POLITICO’s Morning Agriculture host Ximena Bustillo. “They had the opportunity to go on a trade mission and visit with some of the buyers and were excited about going back and learning about the process for exports.”
The Dubai mission also included the first-ever ministerial meeting of the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate — a coalition led by Vilsack and Mariam Almheiri, the UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment. Read more on that and Viksack’s response to industry trade worries in Morning Ag today.
GROUPS PRESS BIDEN TO DELIVER ON VACCINE IP: A coalition of more than 80 health, labor, religious and other groups want Biden to step up efforts to break a nearly two-year-old deadlock at the World Trade Organization by fully embracing India and South Africa’s proposal for a broad waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. That would put pressure on the EU to also go along, the groups say.
The call comes as the WTO is set to miss Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s latest deadline for reaching a draft deal on the vaccine and other health-related trade issues by the end of February. “It will be really sad if this organization keeps talking and debating on this pandemic, and that by the time we come up with a response people will not think it relevant,” Okonjo-Iweala said last month.
In their letter, the advocacy groups called on Biden to issue a joint text with South Africa and India that would temporarily waive intellectual property protections on all Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. Then Biden should up the ante by calling for a special emergency meeting of the General Counsel within 30 days to approve the proposal, the groups recommend.
The EU argues current WTO rules already allow countries to waive IP protections in health emergencies and that logistical factors are the real barriers to the widespread production and distribution of vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies also oppose the waiver request, which they additionally argue would undermine the financial incentives that encourage them to invest heavily in the development of life-saving drugs.
“Many challenges remain to ensure that vaccines reach all countries and those countries are ready to receive and administer them, but production capacity and intellectual property rights are not barriers for vaccination,” Megan Van Etten, a spokesperson for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in an email.
The healthcare intelligence and analytics firm Airfinity estimates there is the global capacity to produce more than 20 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses in 2022, which is far more than the World Health Organization estimate for global vaccine needs, Van Etten said. To reach this point, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have entered into hundreds of voluntary partnerships around the world to increase production as quickly as possible, she added.
The pharmaceutical sector also has recommended a number of actions the WTO could take to fight the pandemic and future health crisis. Those include refraining from export restrictions on healthcare products and cutting tariffs on healthcare products.
— Biden issued new sanctions on Russia for sending troops into two breakaway territories in Ukraine, POLITICO reports.
— British and EU officials also warned Russia that it would lose financial market access if it attacks Ukraine, POLITICO Europe reported.
— The global trade consequences of an attack on Ukraine would be muted by Russia’s relatively minor role in the world economy, the New York Times reports.
— China sanctioned U.S. defense firms for arms sales to Taiwan, Reuters reports.
THAT’S ALL FOR MORNING TRADE! See you again soon! In the meantime, drop the team a line: [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. Follow us @POLITICOPro and @Morning_Trade.
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