March 20 Daily News editorial

It didn’t take long for Mexico to give the United States a strong dose of its own trade protectionist medicine. On Thursday, just a week after congressional Democrats and the Obama administration heeded the Brotherhood of Teamsters’ call to end a cross-border trucking program, Mexico imposed punishing tariffs on 89 U.S. products.

The tariffs, ranging from 10 to 45 percent, affect some $2.4 billion in annual trade. They apply to 53 industrial and 36 agricultural products, including such Northwest exports as wine, onions, pears, potatoes and Christmas trees. Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State University economist, told The Oregonian that Mexico can easily import the targeted products from Canada and other countries, meaning U.S. producers could be shut out of the Mexican market entirely. Hayes estimated that the tariffs could cost the United States more than 40,000 jobs.

The congressional sponsors of last week’s measure ending the cross-border trucking program were crying foul Thursday. But they and the administration have no room to complain about the consequences of their reckless disregard of the U.S. treaty obligation to give Mexican truckers full access to U.S. highways. Mexico repeatedly warned of such trade retaliation, pointing out that failing to open U.S. roads to Mexican trucking companies violated an important provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mexican long-haul trucks were supposed to have full access to U.S. roads by 2000, but a very influential Teamsters union and other opponents of free trade managed for years to block the implementation of that provision. They raised safety concerns. The 18-month cross border program allowing a limited number of Mexican trucks full access to U.S. roads showed those concerns to be baseless. Mexican trucks crossed into the United States 46,000 times during that program without any significant incident.

Last week’s abrupt termination of that cross-border program was, as Ricardo Alday, a spokesman for the Mexican Embassy, described it at the time: “protectionism, plain and simple.” And the protectionist sentiment behind this action appears to be on the rise, which is very concerning.

Looking inward and putting up barriers to free trade is exactly what we should not be doing at this time, with the economy in recession. “In good times,” Michigan Congressman Dave Camp told The Associated Press writer E. Eduardo Castillo on Thursday, “an economy may be able to weather this kind of thing. But now it’s devastating.” Indeed, it could prove devastating for many businesses and families. The 40,000 jobs these punitive tariffs may claim, should last week’s action stand, would dwarf the number of Teamster jobs that might be saved.

Kevin Gallagher, an economist and NAFTA expert at Boston University, says it’s time the United States began to live up to its lofty trade rhetoric. “There’s a growing concern about the hypocrisy of trade policy where we (the United States) say, ‘Do as we say, not as we do,’” Gallagher told Castillo. “I think countries are getting a little fed up with that double standard.”