On the occasion of the G7 meeting in France on 24-26 August, the US and Japan agreed in principle on Sunday to core elements of a trade deal that US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said they hoped to sign in New York next month.
The agreement, if finalized, would cool a trade dispute between the two allies, as a trade war between the United States and China escalates.
The agreement is based on core principles and has three parts: agriculture, industrial tariffs, and digital trade.
We still have some remaining work that has to be done at the working level, namely finalizing the wording of the trade agreement and also finalizing the content of the agreement itself. But we would like to make sure that our teams would accelerate the remaining work for us to achieve this goal of realizing the signing of the agreement on the margins of the UNGeneral Assembly at the end of September,
…Prime Minister Abe said.
On his turn, president Trump said Japan also had agreed to buy excess US corn that is burdening farmers, as a result of the tariff dispute between Washington and Beijing.
Trump, who last week said he had ordered US companies to start looking for alternatives to doing business in China, seemed pleased by the plan to help farmers deal with corn excess, and he appeared to dismiss Abe’s emphasis that the Japanese private sector would handle such purchases, an indication that it was not necessarily ironclad.
The Japanese private sector listens to the Japanese public sector very strongly… It’s a little different than it is in our country perhaps,
….he noted.
The US is the largest economy in the world, whereas Japan is also ranked third in terms of the total GDP.
