Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 27 April 2026, US Assistant Secretary of State Caleb Orr and Bolivian Mining Minister Marco Antonio Calderón signed a Critical Minerals Memorandum of Understanding in Washington DC, establishing a non-binding cooperation framework targeting lithium, cobalt, and copper supply chains. The MoU is the first major bilateral economic instrument between the US and Bolivia since the 2008–09 expulsion of the US Ambassador, marking a strategic realignment by the post-Paz government toward Western investment partnerships. The agreement commits both governments to attract private-sector investment to Bolivia's critical-minerals endowment — including the Salar de Uyuni lithium resource (~21 Mt LCE, world's largest identified reserve) — as operational follow-through to Bolivia's February 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial participation and the FORGE launch. It runs in parallel with Bolivia's domestic Proyecto de Ley del Litio (filed December 2025), which would open extraction-stage YLB operations to private partnership and introduce a progressive royalty structure.

On 14 January 2026 President Trump issued a Presidential Proclamation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 titled "Adjusting Imports of Processed Critical Minerals and Their Derivative Products into the United States". Unlike the parallel 14 January 2026 semiconductor proclamation and the subsequent April 2026 pharmaceutical proclamation, the PCMDP proclamation does NOT immediately impose tariffs. Instead it directs the Secretary of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to jointly negotiate bilateral and plurilateral supply agreements with trading partners, with an initial 180-day status report due 13 July 2026. The proclamation reserves residual authority to impose tariffs if negotiations fail or prove ineffective, and explicitly contemplates "price floors" on PCMDP imports as a negotiated instrument.

On 5 February 2026, USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer and Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno signed in Washington the United States-Argentina Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment (ARTI), formalising the framework jointly announced on 13 November 2025. The agreement is the first standalone bilateral trade-and-investment instrument concluded by the second Trump administration and the first FTA-style agreement signed under the post-IEEPA reciprocal-tariff architecture (Executive Order 14257, "Liberation Day"). On the US side, the ARTI sets out three tariff schedules: (i) Schedule 2A suspends additional reciprocal tariffs under EO 14257 for specified Argentine-origin goods (covering "unavailable natural resources" and non-patented pharmaceutical inputs); (ii) Schedule 2B grants a zero additional reciprocal tariff for designated Argentine agricultural products under EO 14360; and (iii) caps additional ad-valorem duties on other goods at 10% above MFN rates, inclusive of IEEPA reciprocal tariffs. On the Argentine side, illustrative tariff-rate quotas include duty-free access for 80,000 MT of US beef in calendar year 2026, 1,000 MT for cheese, 870 MT for almonds, 40 MT in-shell + 40 MT shelled for pistachios, 80,000 litres for wine (<2 L bottles), and preferential treatment for 10,000 motor vehicles meeting defined technical parameters. Argentina additionally commits to broader preferential market access on medicines, chemicals, machinery, information-technology products, medical devices, and a wide range of agricultural goods, alongside IP-enforcement upgrades (counterfeit/pirated-goods enforcement, patentability criteria, patent-backlog reduction, geographical indications) and investment-facilitation commitments that align Argentina's regime with US-preferred standards on regulatory cooperation, labour and environment.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14241 on 20 March 2025 (Federal Register publication 25 March 2025) invoking Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III sections 301, 302, and 303 — and selected Title VII authorities — for domestic critical-mineral production, and delegated those authorities to the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The order operationalises the "national energy emergency" declared by EO 14156 (Jan 2025) to waive certain DPA §303 congressional-notification thresholds, designates "mineral production" as an Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program priority, expands the EO definition of "critical minerals" to include uranium, copper, potash, gold (and any further item designated by the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council), and directs the Departments of the Interior, Energy, Treasury, and EXIM Bank to mobilise federal lands, permitting, and financing to expand US upstream and midstream capacity. EO 14241 is the cross-cutting domestic-mineral umbrella authority of the second Trump administration, paired with FY2025 supplemental appropriations (USD 2bn National Defense Stockpile, USD 5bn Industrial Base Fund) and complemented by the 24 April 2025 follow-on EO on offshore minerals and the 8 April 2025 coal amendment.