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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Japan’s Farm Trade Position No Longer Passes the Laugh Test

This is a syndicated repost published with the permission of alantonelson.wordpress.com. To view original, click here. Opinions herein are not those of the Wall Street Examiner or Lee Adler. Reposting does not imply endorsement. The information presented is for educational or entertainment purposes and is not individual investment advice.

Certainly foreign customs and sensitivities deserve respect from the U.S. government when it negotiates trade agreements. (The reverse holds, too, of course.) That’s why I’ve always believed that Japan’s touchiness about food security shouldn’t simply be ignored in negotiations like the current Trans-Pacific Partnership talks – where opening the Japanese market to American agricultural exports has been a major sticking point.

The U.S. farm sector is light years ahead of Japan’s (and everyone else’s) and Japan, which the United States sought to starve into submission during World War II (that’s not meant as a criticism) isn’t very sympathetic to free market economists’ claims that it should be happy to become highly dependent on foreign supplies of food because its own efficiency and welfare, and the world’s, will be thereby enhanced over the long run. That shouldn’t be too hard to understand.

But it’s hard to continue respecting this Japanese position in light of the recent news that McDonald’s affiliate in the country has admitted getting 20 percent of the chicken it uses for its McNuggets from a Chinese company that’s apparently been selling giant fast food companies’ China restaurants meat that’s past its prime.

It’s true that McDonald’s is an American-owned company. But if concern about food security is so deeply embedded in the Japanese psyche, shouldn’t McDonald’s Japanese executives and other employees have been raising the roof about this sourcing decision? Moreover, it’s not as if this chicken has been coming from a country especially friendly to Japan lately.

Japan is a sovereign country of course, and if it wants to continue opposing dropping all tariffs on key foreign agricultural products, it’s completely free to do so. But the United States and its other trade partners now should also feel free to consider this position as nothing more than simple protectionism — and to laugh Japanese officials out of the TPP negotiating sessions until they stop standing on transparently phony principles.

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