Why we care about faltering WTO talks

Talks at the World Trade Organization are in trouble, which is not good news for the United States. This country has benefited hugely from the lowering of trade barriers in the past 60 years, and this trade-oriented state more than any other.

Negotiators aimed to reach a provisional deal by April 30, which is Sunday. They will miss the deadline. They will have to scramble to have a specific agreement to present to Congress before trade-negotiating authority expires in July 2007.

The obvious snag is over subsidies to farmers in the European Union, particularly France, and also in Japan, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland and the United States. The not-so-obvious snag is from public sentiment. Nowhere in rich countries are farmers even 10 percent of the population; in America the figure is less than 2 percent. The more fundamental problem is the mustard gas of fear around job loss, wage rates, endangered and invasive species, workers' rights and, most recently, immigration and border controls.

Governments everywhere regard most of these issues as their own business, and don't want to negotiate multilateral treaties about them. It was natural that the activists tried to insert these other causes into the trade agenda. They were not against trade; they were for something else — and often for something very good. But in arguing that certain hot-button public issues were connected to trade, they raised the chance of having no deal on trade, or anything else.

Who cares? The state of Washington should care. Consider one benefit of the WTO deal already in place. The U.S. government has taken the European Union to arbitration over launch aid to Airbus. The EU has responded by alleging U.S. subsidies to Boeing, and by taking America to similar arbitration.

The WTO created that venue, and the rules for it. The WTO has no real sovereignty, but it does have influence, and without it the two sides might not be talking at all.

Our country, and especially our region, have made a decision about trade. We're for it. Our interest in trade is that there be more of it. Our representatives need to remember that interest, and assert it loudly and often.