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All of them need to be made in secret. If industry A learns that it is going to lose a domestic subsidy for the sake of letting industry B gain a foothold in s

by evgen 11y ago

All of them need to be made in secret. If industry A learns that it is going to lose a domestic subsidy for the sake of letting industry B gain a foothold in some other country then A is going to lean on the legislators it owns to try to have pressure applied to the negotiators to change the calculus involved, then industry B will jump in, etc. Better for everyone to see the final deal and decide of the collection of tradeoffs is worthwhile than to have to deal with pressure politics from every particular interest group that has a dog in the fight while at the same time trying to deal with trade negotiators from a number of other countries.

Zigurd 11y ago
Example? All the examples I can think of work the other way: Horrors that industry lobbyists want that sell out the people.
- wmil 11y ago
  Depends on your definitions of 'industry' and 'the people'. Take for example the Canadian wine industry. There's international pressure for Canada to open up it's domestic wine market. In Ontario, the largest province, foreign wines can only be sold at government run liquor stores. Opening up the domestic market is problematic, because apart from ice wine Ontario wine is awful. At any given price point Ontario reds are substantially worse than California reds. Even if nothing happens, once the government starts openly negotiating to open the market the property value of vineyards will plummet. Farmers will be underwater on their mortgages and will have trouble getting insurance. The government doesn't want to endanger people's livelihoods like that unless it's sure that the rest of the agreement is worth it.
mrgoldenbrown 11y ago
That doesn't seem very fair when industry B has 10 representatives involved in the negotiation, and industry A doesn't have any. Of course industry B is doing to argue that the tradeoff is worthwhile. And in reality, it's the big corps that have the reps involved in the negotiations right now, and the public interest group that do not.

by evgen 11y ago

Zigurd 11y ago

Example? All the examples I can think of work the other way: Horrors that industry lobbyists want that sell out the people.

wmil 11y ago
Depends on your definitions of 'industry' and 'the people'. Take for example the Canadian wine industry. There's international pressure for Canada to open up it's domestic wine market. In Ontario, the largest province, foreign wines can only be sold at government run liquor stores. Opening up the domestic market is problematic, because apart from ice wine Ontario wine is awful. At any given price point Ontario reds are substantially worse than California reds. Even if nothing happens, once the government starts openly negotiating to open the market the property value of vineyards will plummet. Farmers will be underwater on their mortgages and will have trouble getting insurance. The government doesn't want to endanger people's livelihoods like that unless it's sure that the rest of the agreement is worth it.

mrgoldenbrown 11y ago

That doesn't seem very fair when industry B has 10 representatives involved in the negotiation, and industry A doesn't have any. Of course industry B is doing to argue that the tradeoff is worthwhile. And in reality, it's the big corps that have the reps involved in the negotiations right now, and the public interest group that do not.