The United States and Japan agreed to a "big" trade deal on the sidelines of the G7 summit here on Sunday, according to US President Donald Trump.
"We have been working on a deal with Japan for a long time. It involves agricultural, e-commerce and many other things. It's a very big transaction and we have agreed in principle. It's billions and billions of dollars. It's tremendous for the farmers," Trump said while talking about the deal here.
"One of the things PM Abe has agreed to is we have excess corn in various parts of our country with our farmers because China did not do what they said they were going to do. And Prime Minister Abe, on behalf of Japan, they're going to be buying all of that corn. That's a very big transaction," he added, in a video shared by the White House on Twitter.
Both Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could be seen in the video together at a presser, alongside the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
"First of all what we have is an agreement on core principles. It has three parts agriculture, industrial tariffs, and digital trade, and from our point of view, it is extremely important to our farmers and ranchers and those who work in a digital space...Generally, Japan is our third-largest agricultural market. They import about USD 14 billion worth of US agricultural products. This will open up markets to over 7 billion dollars of those products," said US Trade Representative.
"It will lead to substantial reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers across the board, and I'll just give you one example, Japan is by far our biggest beef market. We sell over USD 2 billion worth of beef to Japan and this will allow us to do so with lower tariffs and to compete more effectively with people across the board," he said.
The latest trade deal comes at a time when the US is still locked in a trade dispute and tariff war with China. Even though the two countries had come close to negotiating a deal to bring an end to the trade dispute, Trump blamed China for backing out at the last minute.
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