COLUMN LEFT : Free Trade Also Means Fallow Fields : Should the French farmer go broke to help out the American feed producer?

I was driving southeast from Shannon last week and it wasn’t hard to figure out why the world trade talks in Brussels were foundering. Coming into Mitchelstown, on the border of counties Cork and Tipperary, the car slowed to a crawl behind big creamery lorries heading into the dairy cooperative. Farther south and east into county Waterford, the going was quicker, roads mostly empty between the patchwork of fields. Midmorning in Dungarvan I saw some prosperous-looking farmers making their way into the stores around the square.

The Mitchelstown co-op is looking as flush as its opposite numbers in Wisconsin because the European Economic Community has a policy of price supports that makes sure that Cork and Tipperary dairy farmers don’t go broke even if it means buying up and storing enough butter to bomb all of Baghdad to the height of a Friesian’s rump.

Those fields in west Waterford were a lot neater-looking than when I was a boy and could ride miles across country without running into anything more than a gorse bush plugging the gap between one field and the next. These days, with the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC giving export subsidies to grain farmers plus internal supports, no farmer wants horses or unintended livestock messing up soil rich in subsidy potential.

Some of Ireland, particularly in the west, is in long-term depression, but those farmers in Dungarvan were parking their Toyotas for a morning’s shopping, rather than shouldering 2-by-4s on a Boston building site, because they were pulling in headage subsidies for their livestock.

Multiply these scenes across Western Europe, which is exactly what Irish, French and German politicians were doing toward the end of last week. No French president, whether De Gaulle or Mitterrand, is going to tell French farmers that in the interests of world trade and a bunch of beef or grain producers in Argentina or the United States they should accept a 90% cut in subsidies, go broke and end up running a cafe on the outskirts of Lyons.

Chancellor Kohl has his debts too, to the small farmers of southern Germany who helped him to his victory on Dec. 2. They knew and he knew that if the U.S. demand on subsidy cuts to farmers was met, then at least one in three of these farmers would be ruined.

There are 10 million farmers in the European Common market. As in Japan, they have a political clout sometimes entirely out of proportion to their numbers. It would probably be more rational to pay many of them to stop productive farming altogether and merely be guardians of the landscape. But no one’s going to do that, and the real alternative would be economic devastation, worse than it already is, all the way from Shannon to Ardmore, through France and across Bavaria.

There are many compelling arguments why the present batch of world trade talks (known in unlovely bureaucratese as the “Uruguay round” of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) should have come to substantive conclusion last week instead of uneasy suspension. Trade wars and obstructive tariffs or quotas slow up the world’s business. Third-World countries urged to “liberalize” by opening up their own internal markets still find the First World well-fenced against their food or their textiles. The Uruguay round, a series of negotiations that began in 1986, was intended to kick down these barriers, to “level the playing field” of world trade.

The trouble is that no one outside tenured academic theorists of the free market believe that such a thing as a level playing field exists. In the Brussels conference chambers, U.S. negotiators called for a level playing field in agriculture, but outside in the corridor were lobbyists for the U.S. aviation, shipping and telecommunications industries, battling furiously to defend their protected markets. Any politician telling powerful constituents they must go broke in the interests of the world trading system won’t even have a playing field left.

The trading system begun as GATT in 1948 as a way to fend off the disastrous trade wars of the 1930s is now under serious stress, with the threat of trading blocs battling it out behind defensive perimeters to the detriment of the poorer nations in Eastern Europe or the Third World. But as always when the word free is applied to economics, it’s time to cock the shotgun. “Free trade,” as defined in the Uruguay round, would have meant the overriding of much national or regional sovereignty: not just EEC subsidies but U.S. laws on pesticides. The big rollers flattening out that planetary playing field belong to big business, which is why more than just those Irish farmers on the way home from Shannon were cheering when the talks froze in Brussels last Friday.