It has been confirmed that on 9 September 2024, the UK, the USA and Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on supply chain resilience.
The MoU, the UK’s Department for Business and Trade says, will establish ‘a new trilateral collaboration that will strengthen strategic cooperation and address risks to critical supply chains’.
It will see the formation of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States Supply Chain Resilience Cooperation Group, designed to cooperate on data sharing and joint action to build resilience in priority supply chains.
According to the Department for Business and Trade, this will enhance the mutual ability of all three nations to ‘identify and address risks, threats and disruption’ to critical supply chains.
Furthermore, the group is set to develop an early warning pilot focused on the telecommunications supply chain, which it deems essential for today’s global, digitised economies.
By identifying and monitoring disruption risks to the telecommunications supply chain, it is hoped that this pilot will ‘enhance all three countries’ knowledge of the vulnerabilities, criticality and residual risks’ and ‘develop procedures for sharing this information and responding cooperatively to disruptions’.
Supply chain resilience has been a key concern for all three nations in recent years. In June 2023, a new free trade agreement (FTA) between the UK and Australia came into action which the UK’s Department for International Trade said would ‘make [the UK’s international] supply chains more resilient and make the UK less vulnerable to political and economic shocks in certain parts of the world’.
The Biden-Harris Administration has taken action in an effort to improve the United States’ supply chain resilience throughout Biden’s presidential term, culminating in an executive order formally confirming the establishment of the White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience on 14 June 2024.
Supply chain resilience was also a key theme in the Labour Party’s manifesto ahead of the general election in July 2024 that saw Sir Keir Starmer elected as prime minister.
Following the undeniable success of IntraLogisteX 2024 in the UK, the exhibition is heading across the Atlantic next month, with IntraLogisteX USA taking place on 22-23 October 2024 at Miami Beach Convention Centre.
Click here for more details and to register!
Plus, the Supply Chain Excellence Awards are also heading stateside as Miami welcomes the very first Supply Chain Excellence Awards USA on 21 October 2024.
For more information about the awards, categories and how to enter, click here!
