July 1, 2026
Ambassador Jamieson Greer
United States Trade Representative
Office of the United States Trade Representative
600 17th Street NW
Washington, DC 20509
RE: “Request for Comments Concerning Proposed Action Pursuant to the Section 301 Investigation of Brazil’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Digital Trade and Electronic Payment Services; Unfair, Preferential Tariffs; Anti-Corruption Enforcement; Intellectual Property Protection; Ethanol Market Access; and Illegal Deforestation,” Federal Register docket number USTR-2026-0331.
Dear Ambassador Greer:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (“the Chamber”) appreciates the opportunity to present the following comments to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (“USTR”) in response to the Federal Register notice cited above. USTR has determined that certain of Brazil’s acts, policies, and practices are actionable under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and is proposing responsive measures, including potential tariffs, while inviting public comment. The Chamber welcomes the opportunity to provide comments on the proposed actions and accompanying list of exemptions.
The Chamber is the world's largest business organization, representing companies of all sizes across every sector of the economy — from small businesses and local chambers of commerce on main streets across America to leading industry associations and large corporations.
As noted in the Chamber’s August 2025 submission, Brazil is an important commercial partner for a broad range of U.S. companies of every size, sector, and state. Bilateral trade in goods and services reached $134.1 billion in 2025. Nearly 6,500 American small businesses rely on imports from Brazil, and close to 4,000 American companies operate there. Realizing the full potential of this relationship requires concrete steps to ensure fair market access and enhanced regulatory transparency.
The Chamber supports USTR's determination that some of Brazil's acts, policies, and practices identified in the investigation are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict U.S. commerce. The goal of the Section 301 investigation should be to secure concrete reforms through bilateral engagement with Brazil, rather than the imposition of new tariffs or other trade restrictions that harm the U.S. economy. The Chamber is concerned that the proposed 25% tariff action — while subject to certain exclusions — would have unintended consequences, including harm to U.S. manufacturers and supply chains, increased inflationary pressures for consumers, and the undermining of efforts to achieve a durable resolution of the legitimate commercial concerns at the heart of this investigation.
Should USTR determine that tariff action is nonetheless warranted, the Chamber urges that any such tariffs be carefully calibrated, targeted, and proportionate to the specific acts, policies, and practices being addressed — and that USTR adopt a clear policy against tariff stacking across all active Section 301 investigations. The Chamber appreciates the Administration's existing efforts in this regard, including the exclusion of products already subject to Section 232 tariffs from additional Section 301 duties. Of particular concern is the Section 301 investigation into forced labor practices — currently underway — in which Brazil is one of sixty countries under review. Should tariffs be imposed under both investigations simultaneously, U.S. importers of Brazilian goods could face compounding layers of Section 301 duties that would do little to resolve the core practices underlying these issues. The Chamber urges USTR to ensure that any remedial action avoids such cumulative burdens on U.S. manufacturers and consumers
Any tariff action on Brazilian goods should expressly exclude raw materials, inputs, manufacturing components, and equipment for which no adequate domestic supply or alternative foreign source exists to access such items at scale. Where U.S. industries depend on Brazilian goods that cannot be readily substituted — whether due to limited domestic production capacity, unique material specifications, or the absence of comparable alternative suppliers — broad tariff action risks raising input costs, eroding manufacturing competitiveness, and displacing the very American jobs and industries the action seeks to protect. We stand ready to support both governments in advancing a negotiated, pragmatic, and constructive path forward.
Brazil’s Strategic Importance to Critical U.S. Sectors
Brazil is a critical supplier across multiple sectors of strategic importance to the United States. It is one of the world's largest producers of alumina — an indispensable precursor to aluminum production on which U.S. smelters depend heavily — and a significant supplier of materials and equipment for both conventional and renewable energy production, transmission, and storage, which is especially critical at a moment when domestic energy security and grid modernization are national priorities. U.S. manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, chemicals, and advanced manufacturing similarly rely on Brazilian minerals, chemicals, machinery, and specialized components that cannot be readily sourced elsewhere. Imposing broad tariffs on these goods would raise input costs, delay critical infrastructure projects, and deepen the very supply vulnerabilities that Section 301 remedies are intended to address — outcomes directly contrary to the policy's stated goals. The Chamber also welcomes USTR's decision to exclude certain agricultural products — including beef, coffee, and select fruits and juices — and urges that this approach be extended to other critical agricultural inputs and industrial goods where the same supply chain dependencies exist.
To this aim, we urge USTR to establish a robust, transparent, and accessible product exclusion process that enables U.S. companies to seek timely relief where tariffs would cause disproportionate harm, with priority given to goods essential to U.S. energy and food security, manufacturing competitiveness, and critical infrastructure. A list of HTS codes the Chamber believes should be exempted from the proposed 25% tariffs is provided in Annex I, which could supplement the 73-page list under current consideration.
Fundamentally, tariffs alone will not resolve the underlying trade barriers that prompted this investigation. As USTR continues its Section 301 review and negotiations with the Government of Brazil, the Chamber urges the Administration to pursue rigorous, evidence-based solutions that address the U.S. business community’s priority concerns related to Brazil’s tariff, non-tariff, tax, regulatory, and market-access barriers that limit the ability of U.S. companies to compete fairly, as identified in the Chamber’s August 2025 submission.
The U.S. business community is committed to working with both governments and our partners in Brazil to realize the full potential of U.S.-Brazil trade ties. The goal of achieving negotiated commitments to resolve the concerns identified in this Section 301 investigation will create the conditions to pursue opportunities in key sectors such as chemicals; automotive; healthcare; critical minerals and mining; energy security; trade facilitation; technology and the digital economy; and agriculture.
Detailed below are our comments related to USTR’s proposed actions in this investigation. For additional trade policies and practices, including longstanding barriers, that we recommend be addressed through bilateral engagement, please see Annex II, which includes the Chamber’s original submission.
Digital Trade and Electronic Payment Services
The Chamber appreciates the Administration’s consideration of the issues found actionable related to content moderation and electronic payment services.
The Chamber further encourages USTR to leverage ongoing engagement with Brazil to address measures beyond the scope of this investigation including ongoing concerns related to platform liability, content ratings, and data center obligations as well as proposed legislation on ex-ante competition regulation, artificial intelligence, video-on-demand, local content requirements, network usage fees, and digital services taxes that unfairly target U.S. companies. The Chamber’s August 2025 Section 301 submission, appended as Annex II, provides a comprehensive overview of these issues.
Content Moderation
U.S. companies have been impacted by decisions that appear to exceed the sovereign and legal jurisdiction of Brazil’s judiciary. While Brazil’s authority over content transmitted or hosted within its borders is not contested, these orders require U.S. companies to remove content not just in Brazil but globally, including within the United States. If Brazil continues to issue orders with extraterritorial applicability, it will inappropriately interfere with the rights of U.S. companies and consumers outside Brazil. The scope of its judicial decrees should apply only to content transmitted within the sovereign boundaries of Brazil’s territory.
Electronic Payment Services
We commend Brazil’s leadership in expanding financial inclusion and digital access while driving meaningful innovation through PIX. Since its launch by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in November 2020, PIX has become a central component of Brazil’s payment ecosystem. American firms partner with PIX, laud its accomplishments, and consider the continued success of PIX to be a priority.
U.S. Industry does not oppose the PIX system, rather the central concern is BCB’s governance approach, where it serves as both the regulator and owner-operator of PIX. While it is not uncommon for central banks to operate one or more payment systems and supervise the private sector, the BCB has failed to establish governance procedures that avoid conflicts of interest and crowding out the private sector. We encourage U.S. engagement to focus on BCB’s governance framework, particularly given that recent public discourse and media have interpreted industry concerns as broader criticism of PIX as a service. A more targeted approach would help foster a constructive and less politicized dialogue around PIX governance.
To help address concerns related to competitive neutrality, market access, and regulatory fairness, the BCB should align its regulatory and operational framework for PIX with the following international best practices.
Separate Regulatory and Operational Roles
International best practices from the OECD, World Bank, CPMI, BIS, and WTO, all call for a clear separation between oversight functions and commercial activities. Accordingly, Brazil should adopt effective governance safeguards that separate the Central Bank’s regulatory and operational roles with respect to PIX, consistent with international best practices emphasizing the separation of oversight, rule-setting, and operations.
These should include:
- Establishing institutional firewalls between supervisory and operational functions;
- Ensuring independent governance of system operations; and
- Maintaining transparent, consistent rulemaking applied equally to all participants.
Ensure Competitive Neutrality Across Payment Systems
To ensure competitive neutrality across payment systems, Brazil should review and revise existing regulations and practices that create structural or regulatory advantages for PIX, while ensuring that rules governing electronic payment services are applied on a non-discriminatory basis across all providers. International best practices emphasize that real-time payment systems should support fair and competitive access, with transparent and consistent requirements that allow market forces to shape outcomes.
Ensuring competitive neutrality would require:
- Removing policies or mandates that favor PIX over competing payment solutions;
- Ensuring participation requirements are neutral, transparent, and market-based;
- Aligning technical, operational, and compliance requirements across payment systems;
- Avoiding regulatory approaches that position PIX as a default or preferred option; and
- Ensuring consistent enforcement of rules, irrespective of whether a provider is public or private.
These steps would help ensure that public infrastructure complements, rather than displaces, private-sector innovation, while reducing barriers to entry, promoting competition, and enhancing consumer choice.
Adopt Market-Based Pricing Frameworks
Brazil should review the pricing approach applied to PIX to better align with transparent and sustainable cost-recovery principles. Prolonged reliance on subsidized or administratively constrained pricing risks distorting competition and discouraging private investment.
To address this, Brazil should:
- Provide greater flexibility in how payment providers structure pricing;
- Adopt clear and transparent cost-recovery approaches that reflect underlying economic costs; and
- Avoid pricing arrangements that result in implicit cross-subsidies or uneven competitive conditions.
Preserve Commercial Autonomy
Brazil should preserve the ability of payment providers to independently design, integrate, and present payment options to customers. Requirements that compel participation in or promotion of specific systems risk distorting competition and limiting differentiation. To address this, Brazil should:
- Remove requirements mandating the prominence or preferential display of PIX;
- Avoid policies that impose integration or promotion obligations without reciprocal conditions; and
- Ensure providers can compete based on service quality, innovation, and user experience.
To address the governance concerns and competitive distortions outlined above, PIX should operate under the same regulatory and operational standards as private-sector providers and be subject to appropriate independent oversight. Ensuring a clear separation between the BCB’s operational and supervisory roles will be critical to promoting regulatory neutrality, mitigating conflicts of interest, and aligning with international best practices.
Intellectual Property Protection
Brazil’s patentability framework has faced sustained uncertainty following a series of Supreme Court decisions that eliminated mechanisms designed to compensate for administrative delays and introduced differential treatment across technology sectors. The 2021 invalidation of Article 40 removed minimum patent term guarantees, with retroactive application targeting biopharmaceutical and health-related patents, which was in place to compensate for the egregious patent examination delays. A subsequent 2023 ruling confirmed that patent terms cannot extend beyond 20 years from filing, regardless of delays in examination, further weakening predictability for rightsholders. Continued litigation has failed to clarify the practical application of these decisions, as reflected in divergent court outcomes as recently as 2025. Consistent with the Chamber’s International IP Index findings, this evolving legal environment undermines effective patent protection by eroding term certainty and failing to provide safeguards—such as patent term adjustment—that are common in higher-performing IP systems. Indeed, the absence of a patent term adjustment mechanism makes Brazil an outlier not only globally, but also within the region. Other Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, provide some form of patent term adjustment to compensate for undue delays in patent examination. Brazil stands out as a notable exception.
Brazil’s patent backlog and examination delays remain a significant structural challenge, particularly in innovation-intensive sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and information and communications technology. It should be noted that delays have not been reduced for pharmaceutical patents even though timelines have improved for other industries, leading industry to believe that the biopharmaceutical and life sciences sector is being discriminated against in patent examination processes. Despite recent efforts by the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) to reduce pendency, average wait times far exceed the typical 2-4 years seen in OECD economies. For instance, for biopharmaceutical patents granted between January 2020 and November 2025, the average time amounted to 9.15 years. While Chamber analysis has recognized positive steps, including hiring initiatives to expand examination capacity, resource constraints and past budget cuts have impeded sustained progress. The absence of systemic reforms to streamline examination processes continues to limit the effectiveness of these improvements. Importantly, while measures to improve INPI’s operation efficiency should continue, it is critical for the Brazilian Government to introduce an effective Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) system that can adequately compensate innovators for any undue delays attributed to INPI.
Finally, Brazil’s lack of regulatory data protection (RDP) for pharmaceuticals raises both compliance and policy concerns when assessed against international standards and its own domestic practices. Article 39.3 of the TRIPS Agreement requires WTO members to provide temporary protection for the confidential data that biopharmaceutical innovators submit to regulatory authorities to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of a medicine for marketing approval. RDP must protect against both disclosure of test data and, for a limited time, third-party reliance on the data. While Brazil provides a defined period of RDP for veterinary pharmaceutical products, fertilizers, bioinputs and pesticides, it has not established an equivalent framework for biopharmaceuticals for human use. This results in de facto discrimination against the healthcare sector developing medicines for human use, where innovators face immediate reliance or early generic entry based on their data, and is inconsistent with Brazil’s TRIPS obligations.
The absence of pharmaceutical RDP significantly weakens incentives for innovation and undermines the overall effectiveness of Brazil’s IP ecosystem. Without data protection, and with the delays in patent examination and the lack of patent term adjustment, innovators are left exposed and with no recourse. Moreover, the differential treatment between agricultural and health products sends a conflicting signal to investors about Brazil’s commitment to predictable and balanced IP protection.
On the copyright side, legislative changes to Brazil’s Pay-TV framework have extended and reinforced domestic content requirements, with implications for both the creative and ICT sectors. The updated rules mandate minimum levels of Brazilian programming on certain channels, alongside requirements that a significant share of this content be produced by independent local creators. In addition, a portion of channels offered within subscription packages must be domestically sourced, restricting the composition of available content. These measures can narrow consumer access to diverse international programming and may inadvertently contribute to increased reliance on unauthorized distribution channels when demand is not met.
Separately, Brazil has renewed its longstanding theatrical exhibition quotas through legislation extending into 2033, reintroducing requirements for cinemas to allocate screen time to national productions. The policy ties exhibition obligations to the size of theater complexes, including minimum shares of Brazilian films and limits on how frequently a single title can be shown. By capping the proportion of screenings dedicated to individual releases, the framework constrains scheduling flexibility for operators and affects the commercial viability of widely demanded films.
These restrictions can diminish consumer choice and, similar to broadcast constraints, risk pushing audiences toward informal or unlicensed viewing options when preferred content is less accessible.
Ethanol Market Access
Prior to February 2023, U.S. ethanol entered Brazil tariff-free under a tariff-rate quota program. Brazil subsequently imposed a 16% tariff, later raised to 18% in 2024 — compared to the 2.5% tariff the U.S. applied to Brazilian ethanol prior to August 2025. Non-tariff barriers compound this imbalance. While Brazilian producers benefit from access to the U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard and California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, U.S. producers receive no equivalent treatment in Brazil. Brazil's RenovaBio and RenovaCalc programs present additional obstacles: RenovaBio's eligibility criteria do not recognize the EPA's "aggregate compliance" approach, effectively barring U.S. producers from qualifying, while RenovaCalc's carbon accounting model unfairly inflates the carbon score of U.S. corn ethanol, imposing a 300% penalty that limits access to CBio carbon credits and undermines U.S. competitiveness.
USTR should press Brazil to reform RenovaBio and RenovaCalc by promoting mutual recognition of environmental standards — including the EPA's "aggregate compliance" approach, which Canada has already accepted — and adopting transparent, science-based carbon accounting that ensures fair treatment of U.S. ethanol producers.
The combined effect of tariff disparities and program access barriers puts U.S. producers at a significant competitive disadvantage, undermines price stability, and hinders energy cooperation between the world's two largest ethanol producers. The Chamber also urges both governments to explore collaboration on sustainable aviation fuel, an area of growing strategic importance where U.S. companies are well-positioned to contribute.
Illegal Deforestation
The Chamber supports existing frameworks that protect Amazonian resources while providing the transparency and traceability that U.S. companies require from their Brazilian suppliers. Brazil's Forest Code (Law No. 12,651/2012) and relevant international certifications serve this purpose, and the Chamber urges their recognition by U.S. regulatory systems to promote legal certainty, reduce compliance burdens, and support voluntary adherence to high sustainability standards — enabling U.S. agribusiness and forestry companies to access Brazilian markets on a level playing field.
Trade negotiations with Brazil should also reinforce the Lacey Act, which prohibits trade in wood and plant materials taken in violation of U.S. or foreign law. The Lacey Act enjoys broad support across industry, labor, and environmental communities precisely because it allows American forest product companies to compete fairly, supports U.S. jobs, and deters the destructive impacts of illegal logging on forests and forest-dependent communities.
Ultimately, durable progress on deforestation requires more than regulatory enforcement. Policies must address the underlying social and economic drivers of deforestation — particularly for smallholder farmers — by promoting rural prosperity, community wellbeing, and inclusive development. A curated mix of tools that combines strong legal frameworks with meaningful economic incentives for forest protection is essential to achieving outcomes that are both environmentally sustainable and globally food-secure.
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The U.S. Chamber appreciates the opportunity to share these comments and looks forward to participating in the upcoming hearing to address these important issues. The Chamber believes that, approached constructively, this process can serve as a catalyst for strengthening U.S.-Brazil trade relations and building on the momentum of current negotiations to make meaningful and lasting progress for workers, businesses, and consumers on both sides.
Sincerely,
Anne McKinney
Vice-President, Americas
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
