NEW DELHI: The United States on Wednesday said it is in talks with friendly nations in the Asia-Pacific region on the global economy and on restructuring global supply chains.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a news conference that they were “working with our friends in Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Vietnam to share information and best practices as we begin to move the global economy forward.”
“Our conversation involved global supply chains, keeping them running smoothly … and thinking about how we restructure the supply chains to stop something like this from ever happening again,” he said.
India has been in talks with the US, trying to woo multinationals such as Apple who plan to move out of China. A corporate tax cut brought in last year was seen as part of the move.
“This (attempt to rework global supply chains) is a collateral effect of the Covid-19 and flows directly from the lack of transparency on China’s part over the pandemic … There is obviously a serious thought in the top echelons of many global powers on a possible restructuring of the global supply chain,” said Pinak R Chakravarty, former secretary (economic relations).
Prof Biswajit Dhar of JNU, a trade expert, agrees. “It seems the US Administration is trying to ensure that value chains can get back to normalcy but with shifts in production bases.” Countries are anxious to reduce their dependence on one or two nations for a host of supplies. When China was under lockdown, medical equipment supplies were hit as much as industrial production.“One example of our work together is with India. It has lifted export bans on critical medical supplies, including pharmaceuticals used to treat some Covid-19 patients,” Pompeo said.