Vietnam, US to speed up trade talks: Hanoi
Vietnam and the United States have agreed to speed up trade talks, Hanoi said Thursday, as it announced $600 million in deals to buy US agricultural products.
Vietnam has the third-biggest trade surplus with the United States, after China and Mexico, and is anxious to address the imbalance to head off President Donald Trump's threatened 46 percent levy as part of his global tariff blitz.
Vietnamese and US officials agreed at a meeting in Paris on Wednesday to "focus maximum efforts to achieve the best results in the third technical negotiation round" scheduled for the first half of June, the communist country's trade ministry said in a statement.
Trade minister Nguyen Hong Dien affirmed Vietnam's "determination and goodwill" to reach an agreement with the United States, while his American counterpart Jamieson Greer said a deal would be important for Washington as well as Hanoi, according to the statement.
Meanwhile, a delegation from Vietnam's agriculture ministry visiting the United States signed memorandums of understanding to buy raw materials for animal feed from Ohio worth $600 million, the ministry said in a separate statement on its website Thursday.
That comes after Vietnam announced five MOUs to buy products worth around $800 million from Iowa over three years, including soybean meal, corn, wheat, dried soybeans and dried distillers grains.
The Southeast Asian country was expected to sign deals with the United States to buy more than $2 billion worth of agricultural products in total, the statement added.
Vietnam has been seeking help to solve the tariff stand-off from several US tech and industry giants, including Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Google.
It also signed an agreement with US company Westinghouse Electric on nuclear power development.
Trump's real estate group broke ground last month in Vietnam on a $1.5-billion luxury resort and golf course 40 kilometres southeast of the capital Hanoi.
His son Eric Trump, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and his wife Lara attended the event, as well as local partner the Kinhbac City Development Corporation.
Eric Trump has also been scouting locations for a potential tower project in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's southern business hub.
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