Does Anyone Get GATT?

Last November 20, when U.S. and European negotiators reached a tentative accord on oilseed production and farm subsidies, Peter May's A Year in Provence had been on The New York Times Paperback Bestseller List for sixty-four consecutive weeks. This story of a couple who gave up the rate race for a house in the south of France has obviously captured the imagination of quite a few people, probably because a life in the country remains no more than a distant fantasy for most Americans. Yet too many reporters and foreign editors seem to have concluded that Europe's determination to safeguard its rural heritage is only of passing interest to readers.

Thus, most stories about the GATT talks have been relegated to the back pasture of the business pages. The occasional exceptions arise mainly when a trade war is looming -- as during several charged weeks last fall, when U.S. officials targeted France as "Villain No. 1" (in the words of Washington Post columnist Hobart Rowen) for trying to block a deal in which both the U.S. and the European Community (EC) would cut their exports of subsidized farm products.

"GATT is a proven room-emptier in America," the Post's Jim Hoagland wrote on October 17, explaining -- prophetically, as it turned out -- why President George Bush's efforts to conclude a trade deal before the election were unlikely to win many points with voters. Despite the repeated assurances of editorial writers that a GATT accord would inject a whopping dose of moxie into the ailing world economy, it seems that the appearance in print of this four-letter acronym (for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) has been enough to glaze the eyes of readers and reporters alike.

If trade stories are perceived as dull, perhaps part of the problem is in the telling. After all, as Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Nation sometime back, trade negotiations "are where all the rats come out of the woodwork, where national power can be calibrated, and where the fortunes of countries and of people are made and lost." Yet although the GATT talks obviously involve a multinational battle of interests, the print media's coverage has seldom ventured very far beyond the dry assumptions and calculations of U.S. trade officials. This is particularly true in the case of the long-running U.S.-EC farm-subsidy dispute. Thus deprived of the kind of context that might make the reporting not only more compelling but also more balanced, readers have often been left with a simplistic picture that pits free-trade champions in Washington against cowardly European politicians trying to keep their farmers from rampaging through the streets.

The tone of much reporting on the farm-subsidy issue seems to have hardened in December 1990, when a breakdown in the GATT talks plunged the negotiations into their most serious crisis since the 1986 launch of the so-called Uruguay Round at Punta del Este. Shortly afterwards, The New York Times's Peter Passell put the primary blame on the nations of the European Community, which, "never enthusiastic about tackling their potent farm lobbies," he wrote, were now being asked to "abandon farm subsidies to [their] 10 million toytown farmers -- subsidies that have transformed the largely infertile, highly urbanized continent into a price-busting food exporter and cost American agriculture billions in exports."

There may well be valid reasons to criticize the European position. Farm supports have played an important role in turning the EC into the world's number two agricultural exporter, just as they have helped maintain the United States's position as number one. Yet it seems that whenever the United States is involved in a skirmish, whether it be a shooting war or a trade war, many reporters fall victim to the "we" syndrome -- as in "How many of their tanks did we knock out, General?"

The lack of balance has been exacerbated by a tendency to call on European-based correspondents only sparingly for background reports on the GATT talks. Until last year, when the U.S. threatenened to slap stiff tariff penalties on some European agricultural imports if the EC did not come to terms on oilseed subsidies, an often disproportionate amount of the coverage emanated from reporters based in the United States, even when the negotiations were taking place in foreign capitals. This was particularly true of the Post, which relied heavily on reports by Stuart Auerbach in Washington. The Los Angeles Times, for its part, despite its greater resources abroad, did not run a single detailed anallysis in 1992 of the problems facing European farmers. To find this topic covered in any depth, a reader would have had to go back to August 6, 1991, and an analysis by Brussels correspondent Joel Havemann of the possible effects of internal EC proposals to cut farm supports, many of which were later adopted; or, ba further, to December 3, 1990, for a 2,000-word Havemann piece headed EUROPE'S FEARFUL FARMERS.

Havemann, who has provided most of the European end of the Los Angeles Times's GATT coverage over the past few years, told this reporter that these stories were "the only two in which I went into any detail on the foundations of Europe's negotiating position. That seemed to pretty well satisfy the appetite in Los Angeles."

On the other hand, Keith Bradsher, who covered the farm-subsidy dispute from The New York Time's Washington bureau, contends that "the coverage during this recent trade war was more balanced than much recent coverage of world policy. I think the European view was better expressed than the Iraqi view during the gulf war."

When French leaders attempted to block last November's farm-subsidy agreement, American correspondents in Paris and Brussels were called upon to explain France's resistance. William Drozdiak, The Washington Post's Paris-based correspondent, was particularly good at explaining why the farm issue generated powerful emotions in France. "[The] political clout of France's farmers," Drozdiak wrote on November 22, "is . . . derived from the country's deep attachment to rural roots, which are celebrated in music, literature, and history, as well as at the dining table. . . . France's historical and legendary traditions are embedded in la terre -- the earth. . . . The high cost of protection for the French farmer, which keeps food prices high for the consumer, enjoys solid support across the political spectrum."

New York Times Paris bureau chief Alan Riding struck similar chords in a November 12 report from the Normandy countryside, which featured interviews with members of a militant farm organization. Riding went on to state that "fear of a sort of peasants' revolt is a major reason that France's Socialist government has so far been willing to stand in the way of a 108-nation GATT accord to liberalize $ 200 billion in trade rather than bend to Washington's demand for concessions on agriculture."

This portrayal of anachronistic farmers and cowering politicians, which dominated most of the reporting, no doubt demonstrated some savvy about French political life. And the Socialists' center-right opponents, who were even more stridently opposed to the farm deal than the former government, did indeed go on to sweep the March elections. But even the best of these efforts -- including Riding's later article in the March 21, 1993, New York Times Magazine, "The French Funk" -- tended to treat French feelings on the subject as a charming but unrealistic "nostalgia for the past." Most reporters seemed unable or unwilling to move outside this narrow framework of explanation and explore in depth European views about the historical background to the dispute.

At times, correspondents seemed to scoff at European questioning of American motivations. For example, Los Angeles Times Paris correspondent Rone Tempest, covering a violent demonstration in Strasbourg of farmers opposed to the subsidy agreement, wrote dismissively about the "convoluted logic of many of the European farmers here, [for whom] the United States is a greedy villain in the international agricultural marketplace."

Meanwhile, the assumptions behind the U.S. negotiating position were seldom subjected to critical scrutiny. A rare but exemplary exception was a report in the November 23, 1992, issue of Time titled "Bitter in the Fields," by Margot Hornblower of the magazine's Paris bureau. Hornblower examined the background to the U.S.-EC dispute over subsidies to production of oilseeks such as soybeans, rapeseed, and sunflower seeds, which are used to make cooking oils as well as for animal feed. The U.S. had argued that Europe's support of its oilseed producers was costing American soybean farmers $ 1 billion a year in exports to European markets, and two GATT arbitration panels had agreed with the American position.

But Hornblower went on to point out that, during the so-called Dillon Round of GATT talks three decades ago, the Europeans had agreed to allow a free market for American soybean exports. As a result, the continent became heavily dependent on the United States to keep its animals fed. When President Richard Nixon temporarily embargoed oilseed exports during the U.S. drought in 1973, the result was disastrous for European farmers. A few years later, to insure greater self-sufficiency, the EC created an oilseed subsidy program that by 1991 would allow it to meet 35 percent of its needs. Nevertheless, Hornblower reported, the overall volume of imports has risen since 1973, because European demand has skyrocketed; at the same time, however, U.S. farmers have lost their share of the market, much of it to Brazil and Argentina, both of which moved heavily into the oilseed business after the American embargo.

The Wall Street Journal, whose coverage of GATT was usually more enlightening than the paper's virulent editorializing against the French, presented an equally balanced analysis in a front-page story last December 3 by Scott Kilman. Noting that U.S. agricultural power was "sagging . . . in world markets that it all but monopolized for decades," Kilman assigned only a secondary role to farm subsidies. "In essence," he concluded, "competition is growing and markets are changing."

One of the greatest shortcomings of the reporting on trade talks was a lack of any serious attempt to give readers a glimpse of the fascinating and vigorous public debate that took place in Europe over GATT. As might be expected, most French press coverage of the GATT negotiations was itself far from "balanced." Yet for that very reason it provided valuable insights into how large segments of the French public felt about the issues involved. The United States was often portrayed as a sort of international bully for pressuring the EC to take reforms in the Community Agricultural Policy even further. Thus, Le Monde, in an editorial titled "GATT: The Law of The Strongest," argued that the agreement represented "un diktat americain," and that the "primary objective" of the U.S. had been to "clip the wings of the Community Agricultural Policy."

A different view was taken by Liberation, a left-leaning newspaper which was once close to the Socialist party of President Francois Mitterand but which broke from it several years ago. A November 23 editorial mocked political leaders who talked as if a farm accord threatened the entire country: "One no longer tells us that France is the fourth-ranking industrial power on the planet. . . . We are an agricultural nation, made up exclusively of farmers . . . where it would be fitting from now on to add 'rurality' to the slogan 'liberty-equality-fraternity.'" And on December 2, Liberation asked: "Who will explain to the French farmers that it is useless to believe today that export markets can be expanded and financed indefinitely?"

A survey of the French press would have demonstrated, contrary to the impression often given by American coverage, that the opposition to a GATT deal was not restricted to farmers and their lobby groups. One of the most talked-about articles in Le Monde with the ominous title "GATT Must Die," by Alain Gomez, president of the giant Thomson group of French electronics companies. Gomez launched a broad assault against the "ideology of free trade," concluding that it had been killed off by the "cynicism of Japan," and that the incoming Clinton administration had already "written its funeral oration."

Almost none of this colorful debate was reported by the American print media. A rare exception was provided by Earl S. Browning in the December 1 Wall Street Journal: he described a spirited article in Le Figaro by Maurice Allais, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in economics, which contended that, for the United States, talk of free trade was "only a hypocritical and convenient warhorse which it trots out repeatedly to defend its own interests," and went on to argue, among other things, that the weak and undervalued dollar gives an "exorbitant" advantage to American agricultural exports.

Browning characterized Allais's ideas as "startling." Yet the Nobel laureate's comments about the role of the dollar merely reflect the European view of a deliberate policy. Since the so-called Plaza Accord of 1985, when Treasury Secretary James Baker led a coordinated effort to devalue the dollar against other major Western currencies, holding the dollar down has been the cornerstone of efforts to decrease the U.S. trade deficit. In fact, this continuing policy is mentioned so routinely in press reports that it may have come to seem like the natural order of things. If this part of Allais's thesis seems startling, perhaps it is because Americans -- and that includes American journalists -- all too seldom consider the effect that U.S. actions have on other countries.

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