October 26, 2002
GOOD ON YA, MATE:
Australia to scale back trade tariffs (BBC, 25 October, 2002)Australian prime minister John Howard has said his country plans to eliminate all trade tariffs on imports from 50 poor nations. [...]"I am pleased to announce today that Australia will grant tariff and quota free access for 49 least developed countries as well as East Timor," he said.
Mr Howard attacked industrialised nations' failure to open their markets to agricultural products exported by the developing countries.
"The levels of protection in agriculture maintained by the United States, by Japan and by the European Union have an extremely adverse effect on many developing countries.
"Export earnings of the world's poorest countries are depressed by at least 10% because they are shut out of the world's biggest agricultural markets: The United States, the European Union, and Japan," he said.
We should at least match this, though I'd do away with them all except for barriers against states like Cuba, China, Iraq, etc.. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 26, 2002 7:11 AM
What you gonna do about small, isolated
states (the Caribbean island states, for
example)? They don't count for much in the
balance against 6 billion people living in the
big, less remote states, but you can't just
write them off. A tariff-free world writes them
off.
I don't mind if they keep theirs. I'd get rid of ours.
Posted by: oj at October 26, 2002 1:06 PMCan't, not under WTO rules.
Europe tried to keep preferential banana
tariffs to provide some sort of slim economic
basis for some former Caribbean colonies,
but Dole and Chiquita, supported by our
government, sued to prevent it and won.
I'd drop our own tarrifs
Posted by: oj at October 27, 2002 4:42 PM