Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Monday he didn’t expect the new tranche of tariffs on China to to take effect this Sunday, December 15. “We have a deadline coming up on the Dec. 15 for another tranche of tariffs, I do not believe those will be implemented and I think we may see some backing away,” Perdue said at a conference in Indianapolis, Indiana
He added that Trump didn’t want to implement the new tariffs. But “there’s got to be some movement on their (China’s) part to encourage him not to do that and hopefully the signal that they sent over soy and pork reduction might be that signal in that way,”
Perdue also pointed out the main difficulty regarding enforcement. “The challenge is, we are used to dealing in contracts here, we are using to fulling contracts, one party contracts with another and we fulfill that, we have arbitration when that doesn’t happen,” he said. “Between nations there’s not a lot of arbitration and that’s the challenge. If China signs a deal and a contract, what are the enforceability measures of that? That’s really what we are dealing with right now.”
