The plane was loaded and ready to leave Shanghai. Then, according to two French officials, American buyers walked up with cash and offered three times what the French were paying. Part of an order of several million masks bound for the Grand Est region, where intensive care units were swamped with Covid-19 patients, never took off.
“On the tarmac, they arrive, get the cash out … so we really have to fight,” Jean Rottner, president of the regional council, told RTL radio. A senior US administration official told AFP that Washington had not bought any masks meant for France and that reports to the contrary were “completely false”. The Guardian reported the dispute on 2 April 2020. It was one of many.
The record on export bans
By the first week of April, governments across several continents had restricted the sale of masks, gloves and other protective gear abroad. A trade-policy column based on research by the Global Trade Alert counted 24 nations that had imposed a formal ban, a de facto ban or a limit on coronavirus-related medical supplies. There were 27 such measures since the start of the year. Sixteen arrived between 1 and 10 March 2020 alone.
The effects were already visible. In early March, Germany held back 240,000 masks bound for a Swiss buyer, and Bern called in the German ambassador. A French requisition order stopped the firm Valmy SAS from honouring a contract to deliver millions of masks to Britain’s National Health Service. North American buyers of Chinese supplies reported unfilled orders once the virus began to spread.
The column was blunt about the logic. Export bans on masks “erode the capability of trading partners to cope with the spread of the coronavirus”, it said, and “rather than beggar-thy-neighbour, this amounts to sicken-thy-neighbour”. The World Health Organization had called for a 40% rise in output of protective gear and for governments to lift their export curbs.
Who was shut out
Brazil’s health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, told a press conference that purchases from China had fallen through. “Today the US sent 23 of their biggest cargo planes to China to pick up the material they had acquired,” he said. Justin Trudeau asked ministers to look into reports that masks meant for Canada were being diverted.
Turkey went further, by the Guardian’s account. It banned exports of protective gear and appeared to renege on masks already paid for. Italy waited more than two weeks, and a phone call from Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, before Turkish-made masks were released. Belgium’s health ministry filed a formal police complaint and still had no delivery. Turkey’s interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, was quoted as saying authorities would seize factories that refused to sell exclusively to the health ministry.
India’s record was mixed. It eased some mask restrictions in early February, then banned exports of 26 pharmaceutical ingredients, along with some products made from them, such as paracetamol. Once the US president floated a common anti-malaria drug as a Covid-19 treatment, New Delhi acted at once to stop hydroxychloroquine leaving the country. The same column noted that Taiwan had recently lifted its own export ban on masks, but only temporarily.
Sources
- Sickening thy neighbour: Export restraints on medical supplies during a pandemic (trade-policy column, VoxEU repost)
- US hijacking mask shipments in rush for coronavirus protection
