Spring training is winding down, and the new baseball season begins next week. Kids everywhere are digging out their bats, balls, and gloves and getting ready for warm weather.
Imagine a group of them assembling on a field and splitting into teams. They agree on a few simple rules that children usually negotiate before a game: how to call balls and strikes, where the bases are, how many innings they’ll play, and so on. Disputes can’t always be avoided--there will surely be arguments over fair balls and foul ones--but agreeing on a set of basic principles before the game starts is crucial.
The same is true in global trade, and that’s why countries meet periodically to review rules, , consider reforms and agree to obligations. It’s not an easy process, but over time it has produced outstanding results. Trade is much freer today than it was just a generation ago, and we’re all better off because of it.
A new menace now threatens further progress. It goes under the label of “non-trade concerns”. They don’t always look like the old-style protectionisms yet they serve the same rotten purpose of closing markets that ought to be open.
These “non-trade concerns” have become an especially big headache in agricultural trade, perhaps because this is one segment of the international economy in which tariffs, quotas and subsidies still loom large. In other words, agriculture has many entrenched interests seeking shelter from global competition.
Because traditional forms of protectionism are increasingly difficult to defend in the modern world, these protectionist interests are becoming more inventive--and here’s where those “non-trade concerns” come into play.
A “non-trade concern” tries to recognize that there’s more to agriculture than food production. Japan, for instance, says that farmers who grow rice prevent soil erosion--and therefore they provide a social good that can’t be captured in the cold realities of the marketplace. To make sure their own rice farmers stay in business, Japan slaps a 490 percent levy on imported rice.
Soil erosion isn’t the only “non-trade concern” we hear about at international trade talks. There’s also plenty of fussing over biotechnology, landscape preservation, rural development, animal welfare, and consumer protection.
These are not always illegitimate subjects, but they’re frequently invoked in dishonest attempts to stifle free trade. It’s like those kids getting together for a ball game, and one team complaining that a home run shouldn’t count because the boy who hit it was wearing red shoes. If you’re telling yourself that the color of a batter’s shoes is a “non-baseball concern,” then you’re beginning to understand how maddening these “non-trade concerns” have become to those of us who are fighting them.
Thankfully, our government realizes what’s going on. As U.S. Trade Ambassador Robert Zoellick noted in testimony before the House of Representatives last month, “The Bush administration has stood firm against efforts to use so-called non-trade concerns, including using unjustified trade-distorting measures under the guise of environmental policy, to undermine the agenda for agricultural liberalization.”
Yet that agenda is being undermined even as you read this. In February, Europe and Japan rejected a proposal to the WTO to cut agricultural export subsidies in half within five years and to phase them out completely within nine years.
Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United States, along with many others, continue to push for lower barriers to agricultural trade, but we keep meeting with fierce resistance--and often “non-trade concerns” are a big part of it. “We made it very clear that for us it is unbalanced,” said European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, after rejecting the February proposal. “Non-trade concerns are a grave concern for us.”
Reading between the lines, their biggest concern is that they are not competitive. So they are searching for anything and everything that will keep the competition out. If “non-trade concerns” continue to have so much influence in these talks, they’ll lead to something that should have us all very concerned - non-trade.
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Spring training is winding down, and the new baseball season begins next week. Kids everywhere are digging out their bats, balls, and gloves and getting ready for warm weather.
