The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 6 of 13)

I agree that the European Union shouldn't have told Thailand to buy six aircraft in order to avoid the tariff on shrimp, but the United States is hardly blameless as far as excessive tariffs are concerned.

The article in the Scotsman you are citing also mentions that U.S. tariff on Thai prawn is 97 percent. And this article at Reason magazine says that

Less than two weeks after a 40-foot wave flattened massive swaths of Southeast Asia, the United States slapped a tariff on millions of dollars worth of seafood imports from India and Thailand....

The American shrimpers have employed an oft-abused anti-dumping law and some dubious calculations to argue that foreign farmers are selling their shrimp below cost due to subsidies....

The US International Trade Commission has sided with the American shrimpers consistently, and between November 30 and January 6, the commission paved the way for duties ranging from 2.35 percent to a whopping 112.81 percent.

So, please climb off your high moral horse. This is just one of many examples of American heavyhandedness towards poor countries when it comes to trade. Then again, it doesn't excuse the European Commission's behavior either. At least there is reason to hope that this kind of thing will be less common in the future; both the EU and the US have recently given up their long-standing opposition to free trade in textiles, and have opened their borders for these products, which is a big deal for producers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It expect that it will be only a matter of time until trade barriers for the remaining products fall, and the leverage for arm twisting disappears.

p>Kind regards, br> -- Ralf Goergens /p>

Jed Babbin replies: Oh, please. You -- and other Euros -- see no blackmail in this. That is a moral corruption that defies description. We have tariffs, sure. But we don't ask nations to buy their way out of them.

p> UNTERM-LIMITED br> Re: Paul M. Weyrich's Giants of Pygmies : /p>

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