It’s a game of chicken, over beef: Will the South Koreans permit imports of American beef in order to save a free-trade agreement with the United States, or will they keep a beef ban in place and hope that U.S. business interests push for the completion and approval of a trade deal anyway?
The stakes are high and time is running out. South Korea is the world’s tenth-largest economy, America’s seventh-largest export market, and our sixth-largest buyer of agricultural products. Total trade between our two countries is worth more than $70 billion each year.
This could be America’s biggest trade pact in more than 15 years.
We don’t have an agreement yet, but negotiators indicate that they’re getting close. The pressure is on because the president’s Trade Promotion Authority will expire at the end of June.
TPA guarantees that trade deals receive an up-or-down vote in Congress. Without TPA, these agreements enjoy about as much success as democracy protestors in Pyongyang, the capital of totalitarian North Korea.
The problem is that not enough Americans understand or ‘make the connection’ that trade impacts their lives and benefits them personally – every day! Although more think that free trade is a “good thing” than a “bad thing”--44 percent to 35 percent, according to a Pew Research Center poll--only 35 percent believe that trade agreements help them and their families.
Because of this, anti-trade forces in Congress are trying to flex their muscles. “Protectionists,” warned Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., in a recent speech, “try to convince workers and families that we’re getting a raw deal when it comes to trade. At best, that’s bad economics; at worst, it’s demagoguery.”
The facts speak for themselves: Trade is good for us. One out of every five jobs--about 31 million--is linked to trade, according to a new Business Roundtable analysis. In the last ten years, the value of our exports has increased by 50 percent and the number of trade-related jobs has doubled. Even here in landlocked Iowa, the number of jobs tied to trade has risen by more than 348,000.
This in turn has had a positive effect on wages: Nationally, they’re more than 5 percent higher than they would be in the absence of international markets.
How would you like to surrender more than a nickel of every dollar you earn--not to taxes, which you’ll keep on paying anyway, but to lost opportunity?
Clearly, trade is an economic quality-of-life issue.
That’s especially true for farmers. We sell a huge amount of what we grow to people overseas.
South Korea is an especially attractive market. Last year, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service reported that South Korea imports as much as 70 percent of its food.
That’s a market of nearly 50 million people in a country of rising incomes. Yet South Korea’s average applied tariff on agricultural products is 52 percent, which is more than four times the U.S. rate of 12 percent.
There’s obviously much to gain. A successful free-trade agreement would lower South Korea’s high barriers to our farm goods.
Rice is a big part of the problem because it owns a central place in Korean culture and the government in Seoul appears determined to protect its inefficient farmers.
Important progress is possible in other areas, however. In 2003, South Korea was America’s second-largest export market for beef. Then a BSE scare led to what has become a virtual moratorium. The ban was supposed to ease last year, but South Korea rejected three shipments of boneless cuts after claiming to find tiny bone fragments in them.
The current trade talks represent an important opportunity for fixing this problem. American negotiators ought to begin every meeting with a question from those old Wendy’s commercials: Where’s the beef?
Voters will want to ask Congress the same question--especially if our elected officials decide to become professional protectionists, let TPA fade away, and watch good trade agreements like the potential one with South Korea die.
This is no time to chicken out.
Dean Kleckner, an Iowa farmer, chairs Truth About Trade & Technology. Mr. Kleckner is the former President of the American Farm Bureau.
News 
It’s a game of chicken, over beef: Will the South Koreans permit imports of American beef in order to save a free-trade agreement with the United States, or will they keep a beef ban in place and hope that U.S. business interests push for the completion and approval of a trade deal anyway?
