Trade’s benefits a tough sell today

By JIM LANDERS

WASHINGTON — U.S. trade representatives jet around the world so much that annual travel miles can easily reach six figures.

The current trade chief, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, may do more domestic than international travel this year as the Obama administration tries to persuade the public that trade does the economy good.

That’s not self-evident to Main Street retailers pulled down by competition from mega-importers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot, or to American factory workers who’ve watched their employers get knocked out by imports or move abroad.

President Barack Obama campaigned as a trade skeptic to woo these voters, and Kirk is hearing plenty about their concerns as he moves across the country.

On Monday, Kirk was in McAllen, Texas, and Reynosa, Mexico, to join Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon in dedicating the Anzalduas International Bridge across the Rio Grande.

Even in this pro-trade part of the country, there are trade skeptics.

The Anzalduas bridge gives travelers an uncongested highway path from McAllen to Monterrey through Sharyland Plantation, a residential and industrial development owned by the family of Dallas’ Ray Hunt.

Trade restraints

Truckers carrying goods back and forth won’t be able to take advantage of the bridge for five years, though, because of trade restraints demanded by Pharr, a nearby municipality that has its own bridge to Reynosa.

Kirk stepped around the five-year wait for trucking in his remarks at the dedication.

“This bridge represents the most fundamental kind of trade: people-to-people transactions,” he said. “I’m talking about Mexican and American families crossing the river to shop, to visit, to provide a service or to get a meal — to literally get a taste of the other side.”

Trade should not be a hard sell in Texas, which leads all states in exports. Nearly 22,000 Texas companies sold stuff to international customers in 2006, according to data compiled by Kirk’s office and posted on the ustr.gov Web site. Texas sales abroad hit $219 billion in 2008.

In other parts of the country, however, trade skeptics hold the upper hand. Trade agreements negotiated with South Korea, Panama and Colombia during the Bush administration are stalled, in part because of specific concerns but also because Congress has refused to consider the pacts on an up-or-down basis. Obama and Kirk have said they are working through the specific concerns about the pacts.

In November, Obama embraced another Bush trade initiative by saying the United States would participate in negotiations aimed at entering a trans-Pacific free trade agreement. New Zealand, Chile, Brunei and Singapore are already in the pact. Australia, Vietnam and Peru are looking to join.

To make headway on these deals will require persuading trade skeptics that such agreements create more American jobs than they destroy. That’s why Kirk will hit the road this year across the United States.

“This administration hasn’t made this a high priority,” said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents companies involved in trade and international investment.

Reinsch said promoting exports as a way to create jobs was “sort of an anodyne policy.”

The harder work, he said, will come when the administration tries to push through initiatives like a simplified trade sanctions policy, or pacts that reduce trade barriers both at home and abroad.

X Jim Landers is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.