The United States government is not willing to begin negotiations to extend or renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) until Mexico complies with the requirements Washington says are in the current agreement in the areas of energy, telecommunications, agriculture, and others, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told a forum at the New York Economic Club last Friday.
“There are areas where they should be complying with the USMCA that they are not. It could be energy, telecommunications services, agriculture, all kinds of things,” he added, without offering many more specific details.
The US Trade Representative explained that over the past few weeks his team has been in negotiations with Mexican officials “about how they could better comply with the USMCA in anticipation of our evaluation.”
He then added that “it doesn’t make much sense to talk about extending the agreement or updating it when Mexico isn’t even complying with important parts of it.”
“Our hope and expectation is that within the next month we’ll have a better sense of where Mexico stands on many of these issues, and we might be in a better position to have a formal assessment,” Greer explained to his audience of business leaders.
In his presentation, he also questioned the trilateral agreement itself. “The U.S.-Canada relationship is so different from the U.S.-Mexico relationship in so many ways… If you look at NAFTA and then the USMCA, it’s almost like, ‘Why are we bundling everything together?’” he asked.
“A lot of our annual negotiations going forward will probably be almost bilateral. There will be certain issues where a trilateral solution could be useful, but I think we’re going to spend a lot of time just one by one with each of these countries,” he noted.
The Donald Trump administration opened a period of public consultations on the renegotiation of the USMCA at the end of September. Business, labor, agricultural, telecommunications, and consumer groups have been meeting with various US officials to request specific changes to the agreement.
If the administration decides to extend the agreement, it would almost certainly have to be approved by Congress, and in response, lawmakers are also preparing their lists of what they want in the next treaty.
It’s unlikely that the negotiations will be limited only to the existing USMCA, explained retired Colonel Craig Deare, an expert on hemispheric relations, in an interview with La Jornada.
“It won’t be limited to economic issues. We’re going to talk about judicial sector reform, democratic electoral issues (…) as well as security. All of that was part of the package.”
Source: jornada
