| Subject: U.S. Trade Positions Shift According to Geography |
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Date Posted: 02:02:25 11/14/03 Fri
U.S. Trade Positions Shift According to Geography
By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2003; Page E01
Just a few days ago, Bush administration officials warned China that it had better open its market in accord with its obligations under the World Trade Organization. "Our patience is wearing thin," Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans admonished Chinese policymakers.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. The tariffs that President Bush imposed on foreign steel 20 months ago have been ruled illegal by a WTO panel, and steel exporters -- including the European Union and China -- demand that Washington remove them in accord with the decision.
The trade game is like that: To force others to play by the rules, the United States has to play by them too, and to induce others to open their markets, it has to dismantle protection for some of its most politically sensitive sectors. For Bush, those simple verities translate into a tough predicament as he heads into his reelection campaign.
The president has cast himself as a champion of free trade, prying markets open abroad for U.S. exports and forging new trade pacts on global and regional levels. But with record trade deficits -- the government yesterday reported a $41.3 billion trade gap for September -- popular discontent is rising about the loss of jobs to overseas competition, especially in electoral battleground states in the Midwest and Southeast. That increases the pressure on Bush to protect powerful domestic interests such as the steel industry, despite the incongruity with his broader trade goals.
Next week, the boldness of the administration's trade agenda will be on display -- presenting a visible target for protesters of the president's policies -- when trade ministers from 34 Western Hemisphere countries are scheduled to meet in Miami. The purpose of the meeting is to set the parameters for final negotiations on a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would essentially extend the North American Free Trade Agreement to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The FTAA, a signature issue for Bush, is just one of the trade accords the administration is pursuing. U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick took the lead at a WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar, in 2001 that launched negotiations aimed at lowering barriers to commerce worldwide. The administration won congressional approval this year for bilateral free-trade deals with Chile and Singapore, and aims to finish several more by year-end, with Australia, Morocco, and five Central American countries.
But to secure the market-opening measures from other countries that make such deals appealing to American business, the United States has to offer concessions that risk backlash at home. The reluctance of the White House to confront industries with clout, critics say, helps explain why some of its trade objectives appear to be in danger -- in particular the WTO talks, which collapsed in disarray at a meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in September.
"On numerous fronts, the administration has pushed ahead with a pro-trade agenda, but it has not shown a willingness to put its money where its mouth is," said Brink Lindsey, a trade specialist at the Cato Institute. "It is trying to run trade negotiations without much willingness to step on the toes of domestic constituencies, and it is having a hard time making progress. It's one thing to negotiate bilateral free trade agreements with small countries where we can tell them 'take it or leave it,' but in these larger, more ambitious affairs like the WTO and the FTAA, we can't do that."
Developing countries in particular want the United States and other rich nations to get rid of subsidies for farmers that encourage overproduction of crops such as cotton and drive down world prices. They want changes in U.S. anti-dumping laws, which they say make it too easy for domestic industries like steel to obtain stiff duties against imports that they say are sold at unfairly low prices. And they want reduced protection for sectors in which high tariffs and other barriers still shelter U.S. producers against low-cost foreign competition, such as textiles, citrus fruit and sugar.
Front and center at the FTAA meeting in Miami will be the citrus and sugar issues. Both industries are big employers in politically pivotal Florida, and both have been running ad campaigns in local markets warning that domestic producers will go out of business if Washington accepts the demands by Brazil and other Latin American nations for the elimination of tariffs on products such as orange juice.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38222-2003Nov13.html
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