The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio | By Jeffrey Sheban |
Last week's collapse of world trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, should signal to the Bush administration to change course, representatives of Ohio's industrial heartland said yesterday.
Three Democratic members of Congress, all critical of U.S. trade policy, and representatives from organized labor, the steel industry and the environment called for changes that preserve high-paying jobs in this country and protect the environment here and abroad.
"The failure in Cancun is a victory for those who think the United States can't keep pushing its trade agenda on the rest of the world," said U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Lorain, whose district includes all or part of Lorain, Cuyahoga, Summit and Medina counties.
Brown was joined at a Statehouse press conference by Marcy Kaptur of Toledo and Timothy J. Ryan of Youngstown, whose northern and northeast Ohio districts account for much of Ohio's lost manufacturing jobs in the past decade.
The three were critical of a Bush trade agenda that they said benefits large corporations more than U.S. workers.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement, called NAFTA, was adopted in 1994, U.S. imports of Mexican and Canadian goods have outstripped exports to those countries, to the detriment of manufacturing states such as Ohio, they said.
"They said this wouldn't happen. They said we'd have more jobs," said Kaptur, one of the leading congressional opponents of NAFTA, which phased out fees and tariffs between the United States, Canada and Mexico.
NAFTA was followed by World Trade Organization talks intended to remove barriers to trade on a global scale.
In Cancun, the latest round of WTO talks ended without agreement, however, when poor countries demanded that the world's rich nations remove agricultural subsidies and tariffs that protect their domestic products. About 90 developing countries refused to consider adding issues to the agenda, contending that the United States, European Union and Japan failed to live up to promises to slash farm subsidies.
The collapse of those talks is seen as a blow to the Free Trade of the Americas proposal, which the Bush administration hopes to have in place by 2005. It would extend NAFTA-style provisions throughout the hemisphere.
In general, proponents of free trade or globalization say American consumers benefit from low prices for items ranging from electronic gear to clothing to automobiles, thanks to imports, while others make their living from exports.
Critics say globalization makes it easier for U.S. companies to export jobs to low-wage countries, where environmental laws can be challenged by corporations as barriers to trade.
Brown, Kaptur and Ryan said they are pushing a new model for global trade, which maintains labor standards, wages and environmental protections in all countries. Otherwise, U.S. workers will never be able to compete with foreign workers working for pennies an hour, Brown said.
"Just go to Wal-Mart and see what you see," he said, referring to inexpensive products made in China and other low-wage countries.The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio:
