Back to Work - Bill Clinton [69]
To make this strategy work, we need to focus on three points. First, government policy matters a lot. All major exporting countries have aggressive public-private partnerships in which the governments promote the interests of their businesses and workers. If they do a better job than we do, they win. Second, the details matter a lot. The United States should concentrate on the markets, products, and services most likely to bring success. Third, whatever the rules are, they have to mean the same thing for all the major competitors. Reciprocity is important. The playing field is rarely perfectly level, so we have to be as willing as other countries to advance the interests of our own people.
Remember the story I told earlier about the federal government telling Los Angeles that in choosing between two foreign companies that wanted to supply the train cars for its rapid-rail network, the city couldn’t give preference to the company that would make the cars in the United States over the one that would import them? That’s because we’re part of the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement, in which the signatories promise not to discriminate against each other’s companies in bidding on government contracts. But what does that mean? Do we seriously think our competitors wouldn’t find a way to distinguish between two U.S. companies competing to sell them the same products when one company was willing to create jobs in their nation and the other one wasn’t?
HERE ARE A FEW SPECIFIC IDEAS that fit within the strategy.
25. Concentrate on high-end manufacturing and getting smaller companies into exports. This is what Germany does. It’s one reason the Germans have penetrated China’s growing market better than we have. The German unemployment rate is about 2 percent lower than ours, and Germany is the number-one exporter in the world. Exports account for more than 40 percent of its GDP, compared with 11 percent for the United States. We’ve got to do a better job. Taking a page from the German playbook, North Carolina has a good comprehensive program to get more small businesses into exporting, and Georgia has had some success in convincing American companies to move good manufacturing jobs back to the United States. We should replicate their successes all over the country.
26. Negotiate long-term contracts to sell food to China, Saudi Arabia, and other nations facing food shortages. Feeding the world’s growing population is a huge challenge and an opportunity. China’s ability to feed itself has been reduced by expanding deserts and dropping water levels. More water and arable land are being lost every year to expanding cities, factories, and roads. The United States is the world’s largest grain exporter, selling about ninety million tons a year. The end of the corn ethanol subsidy will free up more land to plant food for export, principally wheat and soybeans.
In the past few years, China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with lots of money and limited capacity to feed themselves have bought or leased land in Africa and Asia to produce food, with minimal results for them and for the countries with the land. Foreign owners are far more likely than domestic ones to disrupt traditional farmers and to overutilize land and water, thinking they can always go somewhere else when the land plays out or there’s no more water for irrigation.
A far better course is to build the capacity of developing countries to feed themselves, and increase the incomes of their farmers, with sustainable practices. Some of them will also become exporters but in a way that enhances their self-sufficiency and prosperity.
If we are willing to negotiate longer-term contracts to increase supplies of vital grains to China and Saudi Arabia at prices that would generate a good but not exorbitant income to our farmers, it would hold down big destabilizing spikes in food prices and