American Shipper 12/22/2010
When a free trade agreement is right for American shippers, like the one recently concluded between the United States and South Korea, then our elected officials on Capitol Hill must make every effort to expeditiously ratify it.
However, as so often goes in Washington, there will be a group of isolationist politicians — both Republican and Democrat — who will do their best to stymie the ratification process, further demonstrating their inherent ignorance in the value of free trade to U.S. industries now and in the long term.
Simply put, free trade agreements are about ending tariff and non-tariff barriers between two countries’ imports and exports. Why should protectionist barriers prevent high quality U.S. products from reaching overseas consumers?
Some lawmakers, as well as labor unions, would argue that these trade deals result in domestic job losses, or don’t do enough to hold trading partners accountable on human rights, labor and environmental standards. While these impacts are arguable, the result of doing nothing to achieve free trade with our closest economic and political allies may spell lost jobs anyway, as U.S. companies’ products fail to be competitive in these overseas markets.
One of the most important U.S. industries — agriculture — has already reaped the benefits from existing free trade agreements between the United States and other countries, such as Mexico, Canada, Chile, Australia, Peru, Morocco and the Central American region.
According to a recent study by a group of U.S. agricultural industry analysts (the 2010 Analysis of the Effects of Trade Agreements on U.S. Agricultural Exports and U.S. Market Development Programs), the North American Free Trade Agreement, from 1994 to 2008, resulted in a boost in U.S. agricultural exports to Mexico and Canada of more than 300 percent or more than $12 billion.
...finish reading more about the US-Korea FTA and the remainder of this editorial jump over to American Shipper
