Supply chain strategy and freight market risk took center stage in a FreightWaves Today interview with Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer of E2open, a supply chain management software provider whose network visibility into shipper and carrier data gives him a cross-industry view of how trade policy translates into operational decisions. Joshi broke down what logistics operators need to watch and how supply chain leaders are navigating volatility, planning, and execution.

The failure to ratify — or re-ratify — USMCA this year is forcing shippers and manufacturers across automotive, agriculture, energy, and electronics to scramble for short-term inventory buffers while confronting the reality that fundamental sourcing shifts take years, not months, Joshi said. USMCA re-ratification was declined in 2025, pushing industries from automotive to agriculture to reassess three decades of integrated North American supply chain infrastructure. The timing matters because USMCA's built-in joint review is scheduled for 2026, meaning the trade framework governing roughly trillions of dollars in annual North American commerce faces a renegotiation window amid heightened tariff activity.

The stakes are high because North American supply chains have spent 30 years integrating across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico — a process that began with the U.S.-Canada trade treaty in 1989, accelerated through NAFTA, and deepened under USMCA. Automotive components, for example, can cross the border six or seven times before a finished vehicle rolls off the line, Joshi noted. Unwinding that infrastructure is not a short-cycle exercise.

"Short term, people will move inventory over as soon as possible on either side of the border to react to it and at least have some runway to run the factories and the retail shops for as long as you can," Joshi said, echoing the same pre-positioning behavior seen when tariffs were first imposed around the so-called "liberation date," when companies rushed to bring in goods before duties kicked in. That earlier round of front-loading produced measurable swings in freight volumes and rates, a reminder that tariff-driven inventory moves ripple directly into trucking and ocean demand. "Sourcing rules will take definitely longer time," he added.

Joshi highlighted agriculture as a sector particularly exposed to bilateral friction. Mexico is a major consumer of U.S. corn, wheat, soy, pork, and dairy, while the U.S. imports large volumes of fresh produce from Mexico — avocados, tomatoes, berries, and peppers — that have made once-seasonal items available year-round. Disrupting that flow affects retail shelf availability on both sides of the border. Energy and metals are similarly intertwined, with shared pipeline infrastructure, refining capacity, and in some regions, shared electric grids stretching back to the 1960s and 1970s.

On reshoring and reindustrialization, Joshi cautioned that bringing final assembly home does not eliminate dependence on imported raw materials. "If you're going to look for cocoa to make chocolates in the US, well, US doesn't have — is not a major producer of cocoa," he said, using the example to illustrate that supply chains must ultimately trace back to the geographic origin of raw inputs regardless of where finished goods are manufactured.

Joshi argued that the deeper policy challenge is sustaining a coherent trade posture across election cycles. National security priorities — including which supply chain inputs must remain under domestic control or within the orbit of allied nations — need to be insulated from four-year political swings, he said. He expressed agreement that tariffs on China carry a national security rationale, but said bundling Canada and Mexico into the same framework undermines the continental manufacturing base that any U.S. reindustrialization strategy would require.

On the technology front, Joshi pointed to China's advances in electric vehicles and humanoid robotics as evidence that the U.S. risks falling behind if regulatory friction — including state-level moratoriums on AI data centers — slows private capital deployment. When private enterprise is funding infrastructure without government money, approval processes need to move faster than standard regulatory timelines allow, he said.

In summary, Joshi said companies are pre-positioning inventory across borders in the short term, but warned that sourcing rule changes require years of infrastructure investment to execute, and argued that tariffs on Canada and Mexico are counterproductive to U.S. reindustrialization goals because domestic manufacturing still depends on Canadian energy and metals and Mexican agricultural imports. For logistics operators, the near-term signals to track are cross-border inventory buildouts, the outcome of the USMCA review process, and any policy moves that separate national-security-driven tariffs from those applied to continental trading partners.

This summary was generated from a transcription of the interview; the full interview is available at FreightWaves: Freight Market Talk: Pawan Joshi of E2open.