False Economy - Alan Beattie [82]
In the case of asparagus, the political imperative that first filled European and American supermarkets with the products of Peru is the desire to get kids off drugs, or at least publicly be seen to be trying. Peru, along with other Andean countries, got a special trade deal in 1991 to give its farmers something to do other than grow coca to make cocaine. In the United States, within the same landmass as the Andean cocaine industry, the Peruvian asparagus industry benefited not only from lower tariffs (import taxes) to the United States but also from tens of millions of dollars a year in financial help from the U.S. government. Asparagus is a high-value vegetable suitable for airfreighting, and Peru's farmers seized the opportunity. Exports to the United States and to the EU, which granted similar access to its markets, rocketed.
In vain do the asparagus growers of California, Washington state, and Michigan complain that they are being driven out of business by favored imports from Peru—mainly produced, the farmers argue, in coastal areas well away from the mountainous coca-growing regions. There aren't enough of them; they have the misfortune to come from states whose farmers, for reasons we will see, punch below their weight when it comes to extracting favors from Congress; and no American politician ever wants to go into an election accused of being soft on drugs. In the meantime, Peru's vegetable industry, with the initial helping hand from trade perks, has become one of the country's most flourishing exporters.
Asparagus is not alone. The results of determined lobbying often hover somewhere between the comic and the surreal. An entire trade deal between the United States and Singapore, for example, got stuck in a mass of chewing gum. The Southeast Asian city-state had banned the tacky substance lest any discarded gum disfigure any of its otherwise pristine pavements. But a US. congressman from Illinois, where Wrig-ley is headquartered, threatened to hold up the deal unless the ban was rescinded. The upshot was a painfully constructed compromise. Some forms of chewing gum can now be bought in Singapore, though ostensibly for medicinal purposes, solely from pharmacies, and generally requiring a doctors prescription. To protect dairy farmers, it was illegal for many years to buy spreading margarine in Australia and Wisconsin. (A thriving community of margarine stores sprang up in Illinois just outside the Wisconsin border.)
Meanwhile, at least according to some of the Continent's more excitable newspapers, European women spent the summer of 2005 convulsed with fear that they would have to go braless. The European Commission imposed emergency blocks on Chinese clothing imports to protect Europe's senescent garment industry from cheap competition, raising the prospect of empty shelves in the lingerie stores of London, Paris, and Milan. A delighted press, particularly in the UK, seized on what it called the "bra wars," though in fact bras were a rather small proportion of the threatened garments. ("Why is it that British newspapers are so obsessed with women's underwear?" a European Commission official sighed plaintively to me while the dispute was raging. I was unable to enlighten him.) A patchwork compromise had to be sewn together.
In fact, a sufficiently determined lobby can believe, or at least argue, two opposed things simultaneously. A few years ago, American catfish farmers got cross when cheap Vietnamese catfish started entering the U.S. market. After initial mutters that the imported catfish might contain traces of the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange (and whose fault would that be, exactly?), the farmers hired lawyers and lobbyists who persuaded lawmakers to force the Vietnamese to stop calling their catfish catfish, on the grounds that it was of a different family from the American catfish, though of the same order, Siluriformes. The Vietnamese