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Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

Why do US trade deals always seem to involve agriculture? I'm in favor of fair/open trade, and in my mind that would seem to come down to just trying to remove barriers, restrictions and tariffs for all products and industries equally. But it always seems to involve custom agreements for mass purchases of agriculture. Why is that?

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I guess it comes to supply and demand. Other countries want US technology and services. They don't want US agricultural products as eluded to in the above thread. Thus, trying to sell stuff others don't want ends up making more noise compared to selling stuff they do want.

The US does this because: 1. National security (US farmers wouldn't grow stuff if nobody bought it, which is a problem if the US ever goes to war. Then, they might suddenly need it.) 2. Vote banks (Rural US happens to be the key in deciding elections and support for laws. Due to the electoral college and each state having 2 senators.) 3. Ideology (The reasons you mentioned. Free market ...)

Alluded

Are you alluding to the fact that they eluded using the word 'alluded'?

Yes.

But why does US farmer wanting to export to EU don't just enforce EU norms on food production ? Do not use hormones or forbidden pesticides in the EU, enforce traceability of all all inputs. Then they could negotiate easily with EU for their products, checked by EU validated organisations, to enter the EU market. I often think that it's not for the some free market ideology but just to force other countries (like EU) to abandon any normative sovereignty.

I understand that a global agricultural market with a single norm would be better for mercantile exchanges, but for the single producer EU (or China, or whatever) is a sufficiently big market to be targeted exclusively if they want. OMC should not conflate normative barriers with tariff barriers, they have a real purpose (maybe USA is wrong to eat so much pesticides).

They didn't want to change their practice to export, nor wanted to have any limitation, but they finally did and recently got a bigger share of the import quota.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/u-s-and-e...

Because the US produces a massive amount of agricultural product and the ag lobby is gigantic in the US. If you attempt to cut out the ag politicians you'll quickly find yourself unable to get bills passed in Washington.

Well, it's pretty obvious why they do it (more exports, therefore more money, for the US), but I find it extremely hypocritical that they do it... "let's make a free trade deal where we can sell you food that our government extremely subsidizes" well that just doesn't sound very much like a free market, more like a state-subsidized one... then they have the audacity to complain when foreign governments do the same (e.g. with aircraft companies).

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