# Trade Notes Ad hoc notes on trade law and policy, with a focus on Indo-Pacific issues and negotiations, digital trade, and niche legal issues. Page: Feed: --- ## [FTAs: Reforms coming to Australia's approach to trade negotiations](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/ftas-reforms-coming-to-australias) _2026-07-09 · Devon Whittle_ Last week, the Trade and Investment Agreements (Consultation) Bill 2026 (the Bill) was introduced to the Australian Parliament. The Bill is meant to “improve transparency and community input into FTA negotiations”, and contains requirements for the government to announce when negotiations start, publish negotiating objectives, obtain independent analysis of agreements, and review agreements after… ## [US: What to read on the Supreme Court's IEEPA ruling and what comes next](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/us-what-to-read-on-the-supreme-courts) _2026-02-26 · Devon Whittle_ Last Friday, the Supreme Court found the President can't use IEEPA to impose tariffs. I’ve collected some of the most useful commentary on the decision and what's coming next in this post ## [2026: What's interesting (to me) in trade in 2026](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/2026-whats-interesting-to-me-in-trade) _2026-01-22 · Devon Whittle_ It’s the start of a new year and, as in the past two years, that’s a good time to take a look at what I think could be interesting in trade in 2026. ## [AfCFTA: Rules of Origin for Digital Products - new approaches in the Digital Trade Protocol's ROO Annex](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/afcfta-rules-of-origin-for-digital) _2025-11-21 · Devon Whittle_ Last year I wrote about the African Continental Free Trade Agreement’s (AfCFTA) Digital Trade Protocol (the Protocol), which on paper contains some relatively high ambition digital trade rules. ## [US: Deals with Cambodia and Malaysia - thoughts on services MFN, digital trade triggers, and alignment with US trade measures](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/us-deals-with-cambodia-and-malaysia) _2025-11-01 · Devon Whittle_ Last weekend the United States (US) signed two new trade agreements - one with Cambodia and one with Malaysia. I’m a bit late to comment but there are a few of points of interest that stood out to me that I haven’t seen highlighted elsewhere yet. ## [India-UK CETA: Interesting things in Services, Digital Trade, and the Security Exception](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/india-uk-ceta-interesting-things) _2025-08-06 · Devon Whittle_ In an era of “napkin deals”, it’s nice to see some countries still doing the hard work of entering into comprehensive, concrete and legal binding trade agreements. ## [CPTPP: Six suggestions for potential wins in Australia's chairing year](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/cptpp-six-suggestions-for-potential) _2025-07-02 · Devon Whittle_ We are now about halfway into Australia’s year chairing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, so here are six suggestions of concrete work that could be done to keep the agreement relevant and effective as we head into the last six months of 2025. ## [FTAs: "Forward Most-Favoured-Nation" treatment on the table in India-US negotiations](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/ftas-forward-most-favoured-nation) _2025-05-08 · Devon Whittle_ Reuters reported last week that India may be considering offering a “forward most-favoured-nation” (MFN) clause in the trade agreement it is negotiating with the United States. This post examines some past precedent for including MFN on goods in trade agreements. ## [RCEP: Insiders' views of the RCEP negotiations - interviews with RCEP negotiators](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/rcep-insiders-views-of-the-rcep-negotiations) _2025-04-21 · Devon Whittle_ For those following trade agreement negotiations, I recently came across an open access book published in February that will likely be of interest. It includes a chapter with verbatim answers from RCEP negotiators to a range of questions that provides interesting insights into the negotiation dynamics and drivers. ## [Countdown to Getting Paid (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/fl3kMkP9zlef) _2025-04-21 · **Sponsored**_ Create a shareable wallet timer — deposits buy back time and pay debt down ## [US: Initial reactions to Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs - minimal retaliation, lots of negotiations, early signs of cooperation](https://tradenotes.substack.com/p/us-initial-reactions-to-trumps-reciprocal) _2025-04-12 · Devon Whittle_ A week is now a long time in trade policy and for the past week I’ve been tracking the various reactions to the US’s so-called reciprocal tariffs (now paused at 10% for everyone but China for 90 days).