The administration of US President Joe Biden has ditched a deal President Uhuru Kenyatta had agreed on with former president Donald Trump.
In its place, the Biden administration has moved to renegotiate on new trade items. This has been revealed by the Cabinet Secretary for Trade Betty Maina.
“Kenya and US governments will commence working within three months to develop a detailed roadmap for engagement in each of these issues,” CS Maina said.
The areas that are up for renegotiation include supporting businesses owned by women and youth through trade, promoting workers’ rights, anti-corruption efforts, integrating small and micro business into international trade and improved regulatory services.
Apparently, the US will also be seeking to enforce a deal that was signed in 2014 that provided for “the legal framework for the exchange of information and evidence to assist countries in the enforcement of customs laws, including duty evasion, trafficking, proliferation, money laundering, and terrorism-related activities.”
In June this year, the US had announced that it had started to align its trade deals with Kenya according to the priorities of the Biden administration.
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The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced that the US and Kenya agreed to discuss an “ambitious” trade arrangement with “high-standard commitments” in key areas including agriculture, digital trade and climate change.
The Joe Biden administration has also identified fighting corruption at home and abroad as its core national security interest.
On digital trade, the US has sought to protect US tech giants like Facebook and Google by calling for the scrapping of customs duties on digital products, restrictions on data localization (or forcing companies to store user data within a country), and a ban on rules that restrict cross-border data transfers.
Kenya has separately been uncomfortable with Joe Biden’s administration’s push for a global minimum rate of tax on multinational companies that will force it to drop the digital services tax of 1.5 percent of sales by US tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.