PERSPECTIVE ON TRADE : French Pride, Thrift Test the Free Market : Consumers are winning Europe’s food fight; negotiated tariffs are a thing of the past--for Americans, too.

The Middle East peace negotiations here are now dominating the local and British-satellite news programs. This is quite a refreshing break from the scenes of French farmers throwing raw meat on the streets of Paris, which have aired almost continuously during the last two months.

Before Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush and the others arrived, the big news in the European Community was the difficulty of economic unification, in particular, the bizarre protests of lamb producers in France. Mutton imported from the United Kingdom sells for about half the price of the French-produced fare at Paris meat counters. So French farmers have been pelting Parisian bureaucrats and policemen with unsold meat.

Throughout history, the French agricultural lobby has been invincible. They’ve been able to derail the most recent negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and even dodged last week’s economic wedding of the EC and the European Free Trade Assn. countries (Austria, Finland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland).

Even Orville Redenbacher can’t sell his buttered popcorn in France. The popcorn itself isn’t the problem; it is grown only in the United States. However, the dairy lobby and import regulations require that French butter be used.

But the chop-chucking we’ve been seeing on the nightly news here in Europe really is the French farmers’ final fling. Not even they can avoid the inevitable logic of free trade. Yes, they’ve got ammunition now, but that’s because Parisian connoisseurs have been leaving it on store shelves.

The growing pains of free trade are substantial and unavoidable. For example, the aforementioned British satellite TV broadcasts are an issue of concern on the Continent. Shepherds in Lyon, auto workers in Detroit and even shipbuilders in Osaka have all suffered the consequences of cheap imports. And, yes, the “quaint” French countryside will disappear as has small-town America. But consumers in Paris, Los Angeles and Tokyo all enjoy the benefits of a more efficient, less impaired world trading system.Indeed, that insight occurred to the EFTA and EC negotiators after they began to talk 14 months ago. At the start, the EC’s purpose was to limit membership applications. But now, the 12-member EC will actually be expanding to a 19-member European Economic Area encompassing 380 million consumers!

The stalled GATT negotiations have been an embarrassment to U.S. Trade Representative Carla A. Hills and the President. The Bush Administration has overemphasized this top-down approach to world market deregulation. It’s easy to see why. Elections are coming up fast, and Americans by nature like to get everyone together and hammer out an agreement quickly. But if we want to avoid flying French lamb chops, or rocks thrown at Toyotas, a piecemeal approach will work and in fact is working better than the multinational rounds of GATT. Unilateral negotiations can have an additive, even multiplicative, effect. U.S. plus Canada plus Mexico, or the EC plus EFTA plus Eastern Europe, or Japan plus the ASEAN nations--free trade is spreading like a winter cold in the Madrid Metro.

Some economists, among them Richard Drobnick at USC, have predicted dire consequences of such regional trading blocs. But there can be another outcome besides bloc-to-bloc economic world wars. Let the Europeans and Asians harangue among themselves while we settle our own North American spats.

Once the British and Czechoslovakian meat producers (the latter will soon join the EC) disarm the French farmers, once imports from Thailand soften the market for Japanese home-grown rice, then new opportunities will emerge for a truly global free trade.

Our leaders in Washington must anticipate such events and be prepared to seize the inevitable opportunities. Our trade representatives should be at this moment discussing and designing free-trade agreements with their Tokyo and Brussels counterparts.

Indeed, much of the appeal of the democracy being embraced around the world today has to do with the associated fundamental freedom for consumers to buy what they want at the lowest possible prices.