President Trump on Sunday said that a trade deal with Japan has been reached “in principle.”
Speaking to reporters at the G-7 summit alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said he expects the two countries to officially sign the agreement during the United Nations General Assembly meeting next month.
“We have been working on a deal with Japan for a long time,” Trump said alongside Abe and teams from both countries. “It involves agriculture, it involves e-commerce. It involves many things. We’ve agreed in principle.”
“We have excess corn in various parts of our country, and Prime Minister Abe on behalf of Japan they’re going to be buying all of that corn,” Trump added.
NEW: In an unexpected announcement at the G-7, President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said they have agreed in principle to a trade deal following months of negotiations.
“This is a tremendous deal for the United States,” Trump says https://t.co/7OlfULqoRb pic.twitter.com/u4GDnRNJSw
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2019
Trump claimed that the two leaders had “agreed to every point” and were preparing the pact on paper to be formally signed in September.
Abe, speaking through an interpreter, said they had negotiated the “core principles” of the agreement, but that they still needed to add in some specific language. The Japanese leader also said his county needed corn imports because of issues of pest problems with some Japanese-grown goods.
“We have successfully reached consensus with regard to the core elements related to agricultural and industrial trade,” Abe said. “We still have some work that needs to be done, but we would like to make sure that our teams would accelerate the remaining work so as to achieve the goal of signing this agreement on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September.”
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the deal primarily focuses on agriculture, industrial tariffs, and digital trade. He also claimed that the agreement would allow $7 billion in products to be available in the markets, which he said was “very good news” for American farmers and ranchers.
