[CTC] New Report: 2.4 Million U.S. Jobs Lost to China Since 2001

[Andrew Gussert]

Trans-Pacific Partnership talks seem to skirt Obama's trade policy goal of
doubling exports. The U.S. already has FTAs with the four countries
(Australia, Singapore, Chile and Peru) that comprise more than 85 percent of
the combined 1.6 trillion GDP of countries involved . . . 

 

In other news:

 

NZ rejects US senators' claims on dairy trade

WELLINGTON, New Zealand 

The Associated Press March 21, 2010 

 <http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EJCQ6G0.htm>
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EJCQ6G0.htm

New Zealand on Monday hit back at a group of 30 U.S. senators who accused
the country's dairy industry of anticompetitive practices, as a first round
of talks ended for a free trade agreement.

The talks are for a deal to expand the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
agreement between New Zealand, Brunei, Chile and Singapore to include the
U.S., Australia, Peru and Vietnam.

Idaho senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and 28 others wrote to U.S. Trade
Representative Ron Kirk warning U.S. dairy producers faced losses of up to
$20 billion in the first decade of the agreement if tariff and other
restrictions were fully phased out in the partnership.

New Zealand produces just 2 percent of the world's milk, but its dairy
farmer-owned cooperative Fonterra is the world' biggest trader in dairy
products.

"Because of the anticompetitive practices in New Zealand's dairy industry
and the extensive degree of control it wields over world dairy markets to
the detriment of the U.S. dairy industry, we are deeply concerned that an
expansion of U.S.-New Zealand dairy trade would further open the U.S. to
these imports," the senators wrote.

New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser dismissed the letter as just part of
the hard negotiating needed to secure a trade deal.

"The job in front of us is to get out the facts, frankly, because the facts
do not support the allegations in that letter," he told New Zealand's
National Radio.

It was "palpable nonsense" to say Fonterra had created an unfair market,
Groser said, in a reference to the dairy trader being the dominant player in
the domestic dairy industry.

The U.S. paid subsidies to dairy farmers but New Zealand did not, Groser
noted.

"It's a very, very politicized argument, trying to suggest that somehow New
Zealand doesn't play it fair when any person who looked at it objectively
would reach exactly the opposite conclusion," he told the Dominion Post
newspaper.

The next round of talks is set for Los Angeles in June.

 

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