Want to receive this newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories. October push planned: Senior capital-based government officials from all WTO members will be invited to Geneva on Oct. 23 and 24 to advance work in preparation for the ministerial conference. “If we get this right, it will be a boost for a successful MC13,” Okonjo-Iweala said. AGOA HEARING TODAY: The premier of the South African province Western Cape, Alan Winde, Mauritian Ambassador Purmanund Jhugroo and Georgetown University student activist Daniel Hagos are all on tap to testify today at USTR’s annual hearing to determine whether to suspend, restore or maintain trade benefits for any individual country under AGOA. Winde, a member of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance party, is expected to argue in favor of South Africa’s continued participation despite concerns raised in Congress about the country’s military relationship with Russia. No one from South Africa’s national government is scheduled to testify, although a high-level South African delegation was recently in Washington for talks with the administration and Congress about those concerns. Mauritius expressed concern in its pre-hearing brief about a provision in the 2015 AGOA reauthorization act that requires the president to deny trade benefits for a particular country once it exceeds a high-income threshold. “Mauritius is of the view that this is not an appropriate yardstick to determine whether a country should be graduated from the scheme,” the country said in its brief. President Joe Biden terminated Ethiopia’s trade benefits last year because of human rights concerns. Hagos has family in Ethiopia’s northernmost region, Tigray, which was the site of an armed conflict from November 2020 to November 2022. Despite the end of hostilities, there remained “a consistent pattern of unabated, state-backed human rights violations & acts of violence occurring in Tigray throughout 2023,” Hagos said in comments filed with USTR. Other witnesses include Karl Von Batten, a representative for the government of Somalia, which formally applied earlier this year to join the AGOA program. USTR will stream the hearing on its website, beginning at 10 a.m. TIMELINE FOR 301 TARIFF REVIEW: The Biden administration expects to complete its four-year review of the Section 301 tariffs in “fall of this year,” USTR Katherine Tai told the Senate Finance Committee in written responses to questions. The USTR is in the midst of a review on the effectiveness of tariffs that Trump imposed of more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods in 2018 and that the Biden administration has kept in place. Tai’s timeline for completing the investigation in the recently released responses is her clearest yet. It raises the question whether the review will be completed before President Joe Biden hosts the APEC summit meeting in San Francisco in November, which Chinese President Xi Jinping could attend. On the U.K.: In another of the written questions, Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.) pushed Tai on whether the U.S. might negotiate a tariff-cutting free trade agreement with the U.K. – something the administration has so far resisted. Tai responded that her office has been discussing “a range of issues” with the U.K. under a bilateral trade dialogue, including labor, the environment, trade facilitation, supply chains and China’s non-market policies and practices and economic coercion. “I remain open to the best mechanism to formalize this bilateral trade engagement between the United States and the U.K., whether through a trade agreement or other tools,” she said.
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