Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Environment and Natural Resources

Mark Linscott was named Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Environment and Natural Resources in October 2003, after previously serving as the Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative in the same office since July 2002. Mr. Linscott oversees all trade and environment issues for USTR, including related free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations, work in the World Trade Organization and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, environmental reviews of all trade negotiations, and USTR representation in meetings and activities under multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs).

Previously, as the Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Linscott was the U.S. negotiator in the WTO for trade and environment issues, as set forth in the Doha Ministerial Declaration, having taken up such responsibilities from the very start of these first-ever negotiations in the WTO. He also coordinated negotiating positions on the environment chapters for FTAs with Australia (on which he was the environment negotiator), Central America, Morocco, and the South African Customs Union.

Mr. Linscott served six years (1996-2002) in the U.S. Mission to the WTO in Geneva, where he had diverse responsibilities, including negotiations on trade in services under the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which commenced after the Seattle Ministerial. He also covered customs issues in the WTO, antidumping and subsidies, government procurement, balance-of-payments (BOP) issues, and technical barriers to trade. Between 1999 and 2002, Mr. Linscott was one of the three members appointed by the General Council to the Management Board for the WTO Staff Pension Fund. Prior to serving in Geneva, he worked in the Office of WTO and Multilateral Affairs in USTR Washington, where he was the U.S. negotiator on government procurement issues in the WTO, as well as NAFTA, APEC and the FTAA.

Mr. Linscott started his career in the federal government at the Department of Commerce, serving from 1985 to 1988 in Import Administration, with responsibilities for countervailing duty investigations on foreign subsidy practices, and from 1988 to 1992 in the Office of Multilateral Affairs, serving on many U.S. delegations during the Uruguay Round negotiations. He was awarded a Gold Medal Award, the Commerce Department’s highest honor, for his work on the 1986 Canadian softwood lumber investigation.

Mr. Linscott has a BA in economics from the University of Virginia and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.