ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Gerard Kiely could only shake his head and laugh after listening to United States government and wheat industry officials talk about world wheat trade issues.
To hear the Americans tell it, they are the victims of cheating by just about every other wheat trading country in the world.
It was a little too much for Kiely, the Washington-based counsellor of agriculture for the European Union, who said the Americans are far from lily white.
“They see us as responsible for all their problems,” he said. “Well, we consider U.S. policies to be the real disaster.”
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During the wheat industry convention, speakers voiced a seemingly endless list of complaints about unfair and illegal trading practices and trade barriers employed by their competitors and customers. The list included EU export subsides and import tariffs, and state wheat trading agencies in Canada and Australia.
All this led Allen Johnson, the chief agriculture trade negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative, to pledge to wheat growers that the U.S. is not about to scale back any of its support programs.
“Our clear message is we are not going to unilaterally disarm,” he said to applause at the National Association of Wheat Growers convention.
Kiely said later that it’s laughable to hear the U.S. criticize everyone else when it has some of the agricultural world’s most production distorting and trade twisting policies.
“The U.S. has many different export instruments and very few of them are transparent,” he said, citing subsidized export credits and food aid that is thinly disguised dumping.
But U.S. wheat growers like Herb Karst disagreed. The president of the Montana Grain Growers Association said the U.S. is being squeezed out of markets by EU export subsidies and the unfair actions of STEs.
“The U.S. has neither … and is really defenceless,” he said, and as a result, it is losing market share.
