World Trade Week 2024: Time for a more ambitious U.S. trade agenda

This week, PhRMA joins workers and businesses across the country in celebrating World Trade Week. International trade supports American leadership in biopharmaceutical innovation and manufacturing by enabling American innovators to access global markets, expand scientific collaboration and build resilient supply chains. In 2023, U.S. biopharmaceutical exports exceeded $100 billion, supporting high-paying jobs across the country and delivering life-saving medicines to patients around the world.

To harness the benefits of trade, biopharmaceutical innovators depend on strong U.S. trade policies that value innovation, protect intellectual property (IP) and actively dismantle foreign trade barriers. Unfortunately, the Biden administration continues to demonstrate limited ambition in further advancing, or even maintaining, these important policies, despite a constant chorus of concerns expressed by Congress, the business community and other stakeholders. For example:

• The administration has yet to take meaningful action to strengthen medical supply chains with U.S. allies, despite several opportunities. For example, the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council concluded its 6th Ministerial Meeting on April 6 without any progress toward expanding trade and regulatory cooperation in the pharmaceutical sector. In recent hearings on President Biden’s trade agenda, Republicans and Democrats urged United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai to pursue meaningful trade initiatives to strengthen medical supply chains with allies.
  
  
• As recent congressional hearings and legislative initiatives have demonstrated, there is strong support in Congress for the negotiation of ambitious new trade agreements and for aggressive enforcement of IP and regulatory provisions of existing agreements, such as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Despite this, the administration has declined to negotiate new comprehensive trade agreements with well-positioned and willing partners, such as the United Kingdom, and enforcement of existing IP and other commitments has been insufficient.
  
  
• The United States has not joined key allies such as Canada, the European Union and Japan in supporting a WTO trade and health agenda that would eliminate barriers to trade in medical goods. Public health experts have highlighted the need for WTO members to eliminate unnecessary and disruptive trade barriers in the health sector to improve preparedness for future health crises.

For decades, trade policies that prioritize IP protection, scientific research and the elimination of trade barriers helped secure the United States’ position as the global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation and manufacturing. This World Trade Week, PhRMA urges the U.S. government to reinstate America’s longstanding and bipartisan commitment to these critical trade policies.