The first USMCA Free Trade Commission meeting finished up last week. Here is the trilateral statement summarizing what happened:
During the [the first meeting of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Free Trade Commission (FTC) on May 18, 2021], the Ministers reviewed the work already underway to advance our cooperation under the Agreement. Despite the challenges and hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, committees established by the Agreement have convened virtually since entry into force on July 1, 2020, including the Committees on Origin and Origin Procedures, Textiles and Apparel Trade Matters, Trade Facilitation, Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, Technical Barriers to Trade, Transportation Services, Financial Services, Intellectual Property Rights, State-Owned Enterprises and Designated Monopolies, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) Issues, Competitiveness, and Good Regulatory Practices. The Ministers took note of these committees’ progress and offered recommendations for future work to maintain progress. This work is critical to the Agreement’s continued implementation.
So to sum up, the committees have convened, and the Ministers "took note of these committees’ progress and offered recommendations for future work to maintain progress." That doesn't tell us much.
To be fair, the next paragraph of the statement says:
Recognizing the important role that SMEs play in our economies, the Ministers announced that the Committee on SME Issues will convene the first-ever USMCA SME Dialogue on October 13-14, in San Antonio, Texas, where our governments will engage directly with a diverse group of small business stakeholders, including those owned by women, Indigenous peoples, and other underrepresented groups, to help ensure that everyone is included in, and can benefit from, the Agreement.
I don't know what might come out of this particular dialogue; perhaps it will be helpful to some SMEs. But that's not a substitute for informing the public about what is going on in inter-governmental meetings.
Beyond the trilateral statement, Mexico and Canada provided brief summaries of the discussions. And the Mexicans and Canadians both held press conferences. As far as I know, U.S. Trade Rep. Katherine Tai did not hold a press conference.
Taking all of this together, there wasn't a whole lot of information made available to the public about what was discussed at these meetings. The media did their best to report on what they could dig up, but what we really need here is more transparency from the governments.
USTR recently released some agency transparency principles, but the practices relating to FTA commissions/committees fall way short of any reasonable approach to transparency. If the public doesn't know much about what's happening, how are they supposed to contribute meaningfully to the government's implementation of trade agreements? At the least, USTR should circulate any non-confidential documents that were considered at the meetings, publish an official set of meeting minutes, and hold a press conference related to the meetings.
Inu and I complained about this in a submission to the ITC here.
