BBC NEWS | Americas | Storm brews over US trade policies

BBC NEWS | Americas | Storm brews over US trade policies

"Many of the people I spoke to argued that, not only does the US have too great a hand in framing international trading rules, it also ensures that its own producers are somehow insulated from the tough 'free trade medicine' that it recommends for others.

Big US agro-business is intent on spreading its products around the world, with the simple mantra of 'what is good for the US consumer is good for the rest of us'

Nobel-prize wining economist Joseph Stiglitz characterised this as 'the prevailing hypocrisy' in Washington.
He told me that the US ' talked the free trade rhetoric' but what they were really saying, even under the Clinton administration, was that 'trade was good but imports were bad'.

Joseph Stiglitz was one of President Clinton's chief economic advisers.

'The bottom line,' he says, 'is that there is no US commitment to free trade.'
'It is really a commitment to getting other countries to give access to American producers to their markets and the US reciprocates when it is convenient.' "

I'm sure that Europe is in the same boat as the US in this respect.