This year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its second annual Report on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Report). This report was created to respond to the concerns of U.S. companies, farmers, ranchers and manufacturers, which increasingly encounter non-tariff trade barriers in the form of product standards, testing requirements, and other technical requirements as they seek to sell products and services around the world. As tariff barriers to industrial and agricultural trade have fallen, standards-related measures of this kind have emerged as a primary concern. Governments, market participants and other entities can use standards-related measures as an effective and efficient means of achieving legitimate commercial and policy objectives. But when standards-related measures are outdated, overly burdensome, discriminatory, or otherwise inappropriate, these measures can reduce competition, stifle innovation, and create unnecessary technical barriers to trade. These kinds of measures can pose a particular problem for SMEs, which often do not have the resources to address these problems on their own. USTR is committed to identifying and combating unwarranted technical barriers to U.S. exports, many of which are detailed in this report. USTR's efforts to prevent and remove foreign technical barriers serve the President's goal of doubling U.S. exports by the end of 2014 through the National Export Initiative. Since the last TBT Report was released, the United States has launched new initiatives to promote greater international cooperation among regulatory authorities, trade officials, and standards experts to prevent the emergence of unjustifiable barriers to U.S. exports. We have made progress, for example, in encouraging our trading partners to address unwarranted or burdensome technical regulations through the U.S.-EU High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Forum, the U.S.-Mexico High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Council, the U.S.-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council, and other fora. We have also taken successful steps to eliminate or reduce specific foreign barriers to U.S. exports, such as Indonesias rules limiting U.S. poultry and meat imports and Mexicos nutrition labeling requirements that impeded exports of American pre-packaged foods, among others. This year, USTR will continue to work with other agencies of the U.S. Government, as well as interested stakeholders, to encourage U.S. trading partners to remove their unwarranted or overly burdensome technical barriers. As always, we will engage all available bilateral, regional, and multilateral contexts in our efforts to dismantle unjustifiable barriers to safe, high-quality U.S. industrial, consumer, and agricultural exports and strengthen the rules-based trading system. For example, in our capacity as host of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 2011, the United States has made cross-border regulatory cooperation and convergence a top priority for action. We look forward to making further progress on behalf of American manufacturers, workers, farmers, ranchers, and service providers, as well as families who depend on trade-supported American jobs.
