WASHINGTON - The United States, Canada and Mexico could conclude talks to remake the North American Free Trade Agreement as soon as next month, the lead US trade negotiator said Thursday. The remarks follow Wednesday's joint declaration of a pause in trade hostilities between the United States and the European Union, raising the possibility of closing two fronts in President Donald Trump's global trade offensive.
The three North American trading partners could reach "some kind of conclusion during the course of August," US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee.
He said "that's not an unreasonable timeframe if everybody wants to get it done," adding it would allow Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto to sign the new deal before he leaves office December 1.
"That's what our hope is," Lighthizer said.
Lighthizer is due to meet later Thursday with Mexico's Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and representatives of Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
But Lighthizer suggested he still favored a so-called sunset clause in US trade agreements, requiring parties to renew them every five years.
US insistence on the sunset provision helped derail the NAFTA talks earlier this year after both Canadian and Mexican officials rejected it outright.
"I think we clearly should have a sunset review," he said. Lighthizer also faced stiff questioning from senators anxious to know how much longer Trump's trade confrontations would last, citing farmers and manufacturers suffering from trading partners' retaliation.
Lawmakers in his own Republican Party have denounced Trump's large-scale campaign of tariffs since it began earlier this year, and companies have begun to feel the pain of rising prices and lost markets.
"There clearly is pain associated with what we're doing," Lighthizer said Thursday. The Agriculture Department this week announced a plan to provide up $12 billion in aid to farmers affected by retaliatory tariffs.
Senators expressed renewed concern during Thursday's hearing for Alaskan fishers, Maine lobster producers and Tennessee auto workers.
Lighthizer said he believed the United States faced a more intractable problem in China than in dealing with other trade partners but was making progress elsewhere.
"If you look at NAFTA, I believe we're very close," he said, "but on the specific question of China, the reality is it's going to take time."
Lighthizer also said Japan was not currently open to entering a new free trade agreement with the United States.
Japan, the world's third-largest economy, and the European Union, early this month signed a deal to make one the world's largest free-trade zones.
"Right now it is the Japanese position that they don't want to enter a new FTA with the United States but they are willing to work through a number of issues," Lighthizer said.
