Biden Trade Policy Becoming Clearer

It looks like the agriculture industry is starting to see pieces of the Biden Administration’s trade and foreign policy agenda. During his first speech this week as Secretary of State, Tony Blinken said U.S. trade and foreign policy are inseparable from domestic policy, and the Biden team will pursue them that way, putting labor protections and job security firs.

“Some of us previously argued for free trade agreements, because we believed Americans would broadly share in the economic gains, and that those deals would shape the global economy in ways that we wanted. But we didn’t do enough to understand who would be negatively affected, and what would be needed to adequately offset their pain—or to enforce agreements that were already on the books.”

Biden’s trade policy will be less confrontational than his predecessor, except maybe on China, but even there, Blinken said the strategy calls for more investment at home to “out-compete…China.” The One area the U.S. may need China’s help he noted; Climate Change.

“The United States produces 15% of the world’s carbon pollution. That’s a lot, and we badly need to get that number down. But even if we brought it down to zero, we wouldn’t solve the crisis, because the rest of the world is producing the other 85%.”

And while Blinken as Obama Deputy Secretary of State, promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership to counter China’s influence, Blinken vowed Biden would chart a different course than Obama. What that is, and how the Biden trade approach will now impact talks with the UK, EU, Asian and African nations, remains an open question.

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