Apples cost about $3 in Japan.
That’s for one apple, not a 5-pound bag.
It’s expensive to grow fruit in Japan, what with the high cost of real estate, chemicals and orchard paraphernalia.
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One would think that the Japanese market would be a big opportunity for U.S. apple growers, who easily could fill Tokyo’s shelves with $3 bags of Golden Delicious.
But one would be naive.
Just ask growers from the state of Washington, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to satisfy the many requirements on imported apples set by the Japanese agricultural ministry. Columbia Valley growers planted 3,500 acres of isolated, bug-free orchards. They bought special vacuum coolers to safeguard against pests such as the coddling moth. They even wrapped each apple in tissue paper before picking it from the tree.
But for every requirement the growers met, the Japanese came up with another. Finally, realizing they were being played for fools, the Washington growers gave up.
“We get this close and the Japanese move the goal posts again,” a grower complained in summer to The New York Times. “We can’t win.”
The Japanese first promised to open their market to U.S. apples in 1971. Now they say 1995 … if our growers meet a few last technical requirements.
Yeah, sure.
I bring up the apple story because Americans are about to be bombarded with a lot of highly technical arguments about free trade between the United States and Japan.
Our $60 billion annual trade deficit with that country, which costs our economy about 2 million jobs, was a big issue two years ago, when the U.S. economy was in the dumps and Japan’s was riding high. But the matter faded as our economy recovered and theirs sagged. We took heart when U.S. automakers, having cut payrolls and upgraded products, recaptured some of the market share lost to the Japanese. Meanwhile, bilateral talks aimed at opening Japanese markets dragged on in relative obscurity while the press turned its attention to the livelier stories of NAFTA and GATT.
All that is about to change.
It seems the Clinton administration, like those Washington apple growers, has heard enough temporizing by the Japanese. It wants to see some results.
The Japanese say it’s unfair to demand measurable results. They’d rather keep on talking, discussing all those thorny technical issues, and, of course, making promises.
And so, the Great Trade War of 1994 is joined. It promises to make the fight for NAFTA and GATT seem like a walk in the park.
Bill Clinton is in a good position to play hardball, having established himself as a free trader by ramrodding NAFTA through Congress (at considerable political expense) and presiding over the completion of GATT’s Uruguay Round.
Besides, what better way to advance free trade than by pressuring Japan to open its market like every other industrialized nation?
So the word has come down from the White House: No more stalling on trade talks. The U.S. wants quantifiable and verifiable targets for U.S. exports to Japan. We’re not asking for a guaranteed share of their market, but for a measurable presence in distribution networks and on retail shelves, where Japanese shoppers can compare our products to theirs on the basis of quality and price. You know, the way we judge Japanese products at Wal-Mart.
Though he hasn’t threatened to raise tariffs or impose import quotas on Japanese goods, Clinton’s insistence on reciprocity is drawing predictable howls, not only from the Japanese, but from our own “free market” right.
Bill Clinton, we are informed by editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal, is out “to rouse voters in the Midwest with a lot of jabber about `getting tough.”‘
The critics are sure to get louder when Clinton reads the riot act to Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokowa, if he didn’t do that already at Friday’s closed-door summit in Washington.
Clinton’s critics say it’s wrong to retaliate against protectionist Japan, because protectionism is its own punishment. Keep forcing your consumers to buy $3 apples, this logic goes, and eventually your economy will fall behind those of other countries that buy their apples-and everything else-at cheaper world prices.
Eventually, sure.
But none of us will live that long.
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