Talks between the Trump administration and Japan to improve market access for U.S. agriculture and other sectors are already underway and will soon reach a "new level," U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Tuesday on the eve of new reciprocal tariffs taking effect.
“We want to have more market access in Japan for us. We feel like we should have more and better agricultural market access,” Greer told the Senate Finance Committee.
Committee members pressed Greer over the administration’s ambiguity over whether it would negotiate with countries to lower the new reciprocal duties President Donald Trump unveiled last week. In the wake of the announcement, multiple cabinet members and the president took to the airwaves and social media to argue the tariffs were not negotiating tools and would remain in place.
But Greer stressed that while the president’s tariffs would go into effect as announced on Wednesday, the administration is “coupling that with immediate negotiations with our partners.”
Greer said that around 50 trading partners had already reached out to the administration to open negotiations.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump said that South Korea’s government is sending a team of negotiators to engage with the U.S. administration following a call between Trump and acting President Han Duck-soo.
But Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley sought further reassurances.
During his remarks in the Rose Garden last week announcing the tariffs, the president suggested that the new duties would accomplish multiple aims. He argued they would be used to secure greater market access, raise revenues to fund his domestic tax agenda and spur companies to bring manufacturing operations back to the U.S.
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Grassley said that he could only support new duties if their ultimate focus is to secure additional market access – and not to increase federal revenue.
Greer warned Grassley that not every country would offer sufficient concessions on non-tariff barriers to trade to secure relief. Greer insisted that the administration is “seeking reciprocity” and that the president “will have the option of engaging with them.”
Among the non-tariff barriers Greer railed against in the nearly three-hour hearing were obstacles U.S. beef and pork producers face when exporting to Australia.
Senators from both parties, however, expressed concerns that the administration may be trying to do too much at once. Securing deals with dozens of partners could take time, they reasoned, even for those willing to make concessions.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. pointed to the two years spent negotiating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement during Trump’s first term.
“Now you're telling us you have nearly 50 countries coming to you,” Cortez Masto said. “You think that you could do that overnight?”
Greer refused to give a timeline for how long negotiations might take to conclude, despite Cortez Masto and Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford’s requests to do so, but he stressed that the administration “is moving as quickly as possible.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he hopes the administration can provide some trade policy certainty ahead of the midterm campaigns.
“Everything that we need to do to know what the political environment is going to be about next year, has got to be done by February,” Tillis said. “That's about the timeline we've got to work with.”
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., warned that the U.S. beef industry may not be able to wait long for a deal. China accounts for more than 15% of U.S. beef product exports, according to Agriculture Department data. Yet in the wake of China’s retaliatory tariffs, U.S. exports to the country have cratered, Daines argued.
“The valve is shut right now for U.S. beef producers,” Daines warned.
Trump on Monday said he would impose an additional 50% duty on China starting Wednesday if Beijing doesn’t lift its retaliatory duty. The president said in a social media post on Tuesday morning that he was still “waiting for their call.”
During the hearing, Greer told Daines that the future of U.S.-China trade under this administration would depend on how Beijing approaches any future negotiations.
“A lot of this is going to be up to the Chinese on how forward-leaning they want to be on having fair trade with us,” Greer told senators. “I'm very sensitive to this issue in particular.”
Several Democrats also used the hearing to test Greer’s resolve to stick to the tariffs in the face of a sustained stock market selloff and recession risks. Wall Street suffered the worst week since the pandemic last week and Goldman Sachs is now predicting a 45% risk of recession in the next twelve months.
“We lost 700,000 jobs each month in the last recession,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said. If similar job losses occur under this administration, she asked, “Will the administration reverse course and lift those tariffs?”
Greer, however, disputed that such an outcome would happen.
“The Wall Street analysts are wrong,” Greer said, arguing that the administration wants to keep its attention on lowering trade deficits. “That's the emergency we're focused on,” he added.
Leaving the hearing, Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, told Agri-Pulse that the ambassador had clearly articulated the administration’s goals in forthcoming trade negotiations.
“The ambassador said very clearly,” the administration would work “to address tariff and nontariff barriers to open access across the globe.”
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