Trade Disputes

April 11, 2006

I picked up the paper today and headlines tell the whole story. "Pessimism Looms as Trade Talks Set to Reopen." Things could change but the Doha Trade Talks appear to be dead.

Should we be surprised? I'm all for lowering trade barriers, but the process is a two-way street. On another page in the paper, I see where sales of General Motors cars fell 4% and Ford collapsed 9%. But -- Toyota is up 11.7%. Toyota makes a great car and we can't get enough of them. At the same time, the Japanese are only now just starting to buy our beef after more than 4 years. They have used a phony excuse of mad cow disease to close us out of their market. We found one sick cow in December of 2003 -- a Canadian cow at that. They have found more than 20 mad cows in Japan. They didn't stop eating their own diseased beef. The Japanese consumer would like to get our beef. It costs about ¼ as much money as Japanese beef.

Let's look at another country -- Korea. They still refuse to accept our beef. President Bush just completed negotiations ofa Free Trade Agreement with Korea. We have agreed to accept their cars without any tariff. The agreement does have some positive provisions, but the beef stand-off sours the whole package.

When I was at the farm last week, I rented a car. They gave me a Korean car. That just reminded me of how frustrating trade disputes can be. Fortunately, the Congress is not likely to approve the Korean agreement unless the beef ban is lifted.

In closing -- to report to you on my farm visit last week -- we did buy one piece of the farm that was auctioned. It was too expensive, but it joins us.

Until next week, I am Jack Block from Washington.