The Great Spaghetti Spat

The renewal of the Pasta War is instructive. It demonstrates the ineffectiveness of present treaty structures to work out solutions to old problems, and it demonstrates the futility of retaliation, however righteous the indignation.

The anger of the United States with the European Economic Community is understandable. This is an old dispute, pulled back from the brink once before. The Europeans should have eased the barriers against American citrus and permitted the U.S. exporters a fairer competition with the Mediterranean producers. But getting an agreement out of the 10 community nations is never easy, and on this subject at this time--as the community anticipates the January entry of Spain, another major citrus producer--decision-making seemed an impossibility.

So the United States slapped an enormous tariff on Italian pasta--a move that will bring tears to the eyes of the millions of Americans who cherish the product, and that will please only the U.S. pasta producers. The Europeans, unrepentant, immediately retaliated with restrictions on lemon and nut imports. So Italy, one of America’s most cooperative allies, and California growers are to be punished for everybody’s sins.

A day after the lemon-and-pasta crunch the American and European negotiators resolved another stalled agreement--this one concerning the flood of European steel shipments that seemed to exceed the limits agreed to earlier. That served to show that agreements could be had, sometimes.

The Europeans have defended their Mediterranean citrus preferences as an important contribution to key economies in the region, and so they are. Their piety, however, need not have prevented steps to narrow the difference between tariffs for Mediterranean and American products, as recommended within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Europeans have snarled back, noting the preferences extended by the United States to selected hemispheric neighbors through the Caribbean Basin Initiative. The comparison is not altogether fair, in that the United States maintained in the Caribbean agreement a provision to permit trading partners to lodge the very kind of fairness challenge that the United States brought on Mediterranean citrus.

The penalties will cost Italian pasta makers about $32 million, and U.S. lemon and nut growers will lose about the same. That hardly seems worth the trouble, given the scale of U.S.-European Community trade. In the first nine months of this year the United States exported $34.3 billion in merchandise to the European community and imported $50 billion in goods. Last year U.S. exports to the community were 22% of total American exports, and European Community shipments were 18% of the total imports into the United States.

The impatience in Washington that renewed the Pasta War was probably not all due to the indecisive Europeans. The pressure for protectionism being generated in Congress raises the risk of further foolishness.