The recent U.S. election will bring more protectionism and the need for tough Canadian resistance, says a long-time Liberal MP.
Wayne Easter, a member of the Canada-U.S. Parliamentary Association, said it’s obvious what a stronger Democratic control of Congress will mean for Canadian exporters.
“I don’t think there’s any question you’re looking at a more protectionist House (of Representatives) and likely the Senate as well since Democrats tend to be more protectionist,” he said.
“There could be problems there, so on our side we have to be just as aggressive. We have to be forceful.”
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Easter said as an agricultural exporter, Canada is vulnerable.
“We’re going to have to work with them to gain our advantage but not be fearful of challenging them when the time is appropriate to do so.”
The six-term Prince Edward Island MP and former president of the National Farmers Union said he believes from his American contacts that the administration of president-elect Barack Obama will understand that in grim economic times, protectionism is not an answer.
However, the American political structure gives Congress and regulatory bodies significant power to create trade barriers in response to lobbying from domestic agricultural sectors opposed to competition from imports.
“We have to be willing to fight back and to let the U.S. know we will not be a pushover,” he said.
“We have to defend ourselves and to convince the Americans that combating the economic turmoil is helped by trade, not by protectionism.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has added several significant items to the list of high expectations for the president-elect.
He should make it a priority to end world hunger, said FAO director general Jacques Diouf.
He called on Obama to convene a world summit on food security in the first half of 2009 to try to do what the June 2008 FAO world food summit in Rome did not do – convert good intentions and promises into investment in developing world small-scale agriculture.
“The summit must find $30 billion US per year to build and develop rural infrastructures and increase agricultural productivity in the developing world, particularly in low-income food-deficit countries with a view to doubling production to ensure food security for a world population expected to reach nine billion by 2050,” Diouf said in what he called a message congratulating Obama on being the first African American to win the presidency.
Since the Rome summit of grand platitudes and vague promises of new money, more than 50 million people have been added to the estimate of chronically hungry people in the world. The total now stands at 923 million.
Little of the money promised by government leaders and agriculture ministers at the three-day meeting in Rome has materialized.
Diouf added a secondary expectation for Obama, whose father was Kenyan: he should use the food summit to rearrange more than seven years of unsuccessful World Trade Organization negotiations to create a new international trading system.
“The summit should lay the basis for a new agricultural trade system offering farmers in developed and developing countries alike the chance to make a decent living,” he said.
