Barriers by E.E.C. attacked

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 1

Barriers by E.E.C. attacked

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, December 29. A key White House adviser said today that the world’s system of trade was being seriously eroded by what he called tragic and unjustified barriers by the European Common Market against outside farm products.

Mr Peter Peterson, President Nixon’s assistant for international economic affairs, criticised E.E.C. trade policies in a 124-page review

of the world trade situation which he describes as a personal analysis. It was compiled from briefing material presented to leading members of the United States Administration, Congress, and nongovernmental groups. The study comes as the Administration is preparing for a long round of trade negotiations with the Common Market. Mr Peterson said that these negotiations could take a year before reaching the “really intensive stage” on long-range reductions of trade barriers.

Criticising both the Common Market’s system of pre-

ferences for imports from some African and Mediterranean countries mainly former colonies—-and its policies designed to protect European farmers, Mr Peterson said:

“Discriminatory arrangements have proliferated in the last few years, and the forces that lead towards splitting up the world into blocks of influence threaten both the basic foundations of the postwar trading system and the non-discriminatory basis of political-economic relations which have been of such benefit. He said: “This trend threatens to leave as outcasts the Asian and Latin Ameri-

can countries at a time when their trade needs are growing rapidly with their rising unemployment.” The Presidential adviser warned: “The United States cannot for long be expected to adhere to the principle of non-discrimination when so large a breach in that principle has been made.”

He did not expand on this implication of possible United States retaliation but added that American agricultural products were vulnerable to further restrictions if the United States implemented restrictive trade quotas against European nations. Mr Peterson said that all countries, including the

United States, had some mechanism to protect their own farmers, but the Common Market had gone to unjustified lengths. “As a result,” he said, “European consumers eat less well, and American and other farmers live less well. “When other parts of the world could produce and sell far more efficiently, including some of the smaller trading countries like Australia and New Zealand, there is no real justification for continuation of a system like that of Europe’s which passes so much of its adjustment costs on to other nations, distorting world production and trade,” he said.