6 MINUTE READ President Joe Biden speaks after the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework family photo at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez) NOVEMBER 16, 2023
Moscone Convention Center
San Francisco, California
4:44 P.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Sorry to keep you waiting. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. I was on the phone.
Hello, everyone. We just came from a — please have a seat — a three-hour meeting with all 21 APEC economies discussing how to generate more growth and more opportunity in the region, particularly to deal with climate change.
Today, we’re announcing progress on the important initiative that we proposed with 13 of my colleagues here and of our — of 13 r- — APEC partners — the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — Australia, Brunei, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States.
In May of 2022, we came together in Tokyo to launch negotiations on this so-called framework. We still have more work to do, but we’ve made substantial progress. In record time, we’ve reached consensus on three of the pillars of the IPEF. I hate acronyms. I apologize. (Laughter.)
The first, we signed a first-of-its-kind supply chain agreement to help identify supply chain bottlenecks before they become the kind of disruptions we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw what happened then in the United States and elsewhere. But the Unites States’ semiconductor supply chains dried up in Asia, and the United States — a lot of it shut down.This is an agreement we’ve been in — we put back in place. We could — if we had this agreement in place we’re talking about today, we would not have had to lay off so many auto workers because lack of semiconductors and many […]
Click here to visit source. Remarks by President Biden at the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework