An Urban's Rural View

You're sitting at a bare metal table in an otherwise unfurnished cube of a room. The walls lack even a hint of color; a single bulb hanging from the ceiling provides the only light. Across the table sits a man with a sympathetic face. In a dark corner lurks another man, his right hand in his pocket. You fear the hand clutches a blackjack.

"You've got to cooperate with me," the first man says. "I'll try to stop him, but if he takes over you're not going to like it."

Anyone who's watched a TV detective show knows what's going on. It's the good-cop, bad-cop routine. "I'm innocent," you plead, but in the end you confess. The cops prove again that threatening force often works better than wielding it.

That, as it happens, is as true in trade negotiations as it is in crime investigations. The negotiator plays the good cop, a worldly fellow who understands the importance of free trade. The bad cop is the narrow-minded, provincial legislature that must vote on the agreement for it to take effect.

"I'd like to give you that but I can't," the negotiator says. "Congress will vote the whole deal down if that's in it."

The European Union has been using this technique in the negotiations with the U.S. over a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP. We can't even talk about allowing imports of genetically engineered products, the EU has been saying. Our member countries will not tolerate it.

Now Congress has given Uncle Sam a chance to play the game. In a letter to Ag secretary Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman (http://tiny.cc/…), 55 U.S. Senators urge our negotiators to tell the EU that the U.S. will reject any proposals that "restrict in any way the ability of U.S. producers to use common cheese names."

Yes, that's what the EU is proposing. The EU's 28 member countries already observe these naming restrictions: A Parma ham must come from Parma in Italy; Champagne must come from the Champagne region of France; Roquefort cheese must come from Roquefort in the south of France. Now the EU is trying to impose similar restrictions in other countries through trade agreements.

According to the senators' letter, Canada recently agreed to "impose new restrictions on the use of 'feta' and other common cheese names." In the TTIP talks, "Geographic Indication" restrictions are the EU's main agriculture demand.

We won't abide them, the 55 Senators say. "We ask," their letter concludes, "that USTR and USDA continue to work aggressively to ensure the EU's GI efforts on commonly used cheese names do not impair U.S. businesses' ability to compete domestically or internationally and that you make this a top priority through both official TTIP and bilateral negotiations."

Thanks, bad cop. This gives our good-cop negotiators a much-needed threat of force.

Here's the problem, though. What if the good-cop, bad-cop number the U.S. and EU are doing on each other's main agricultural demand works for both sides? Negotiators would have little choice but to move on to other issues. Agriculture could get left out of a TTIP agreement altogether.

American farmers and agribusinesses might prefer no TTIP deal to a TTIP deal that excludes agriculture. Would our bad-cop Congress use its blackjack to make that happen? Or even threaten to use it? Maybe, maybe not. We've yet to see that episode of the show.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com