The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 104

8-D. Zb.t Atlanta JournaHNDCONTITlTlON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1982 -J Rise of world trade protectionism disturbingly like Depression era Sale prices in effect now thru Sat, Dec 11. By Ernest Conine The Lot Angeles Times flow arM $52 B-r f. -A a ni .1 ill- "i y.x i xs. GAMES OF THE CENTURY" I -ill after Ml 25.95 Deadly Duck Fast Eddie that have long advocated liberalized trading rules," he said.

"They say that no one else is playing by the rules, so why should we?" "The American farmer," Strauss charged, "is not competing with the European farmer, but with $7 billion of agricultural subsidies by the European Economic Community. The American aerospace worker is really competing with France's policy of export credit financing. And American computer technicians are not competing with their Japanese counterparts, but with the predatory pricing policies of the Japanese computer industry." The Europeans and Japanese have complaints of their own, but the fact is that U.S. officials arrived in Geneva last week anxious to negotiate a cease-fire in predatory trade practices, while the Europeans arrived in quite a different mood. It is probably, time to face the fact that world trade is becoming ever more politicized, with the direction and content of trade flows determined by governments instead of market forces.

Foreign Trade Minister Michel Jobert of France may have been the real voice of the future with his. attack in Geneva on U.S. calls for lower trade barriers. Such a posture, he charged, reflects the "spirit of the past, which said, 'Let's make trade free and prosperity will come That kind of thinking is outdated, he insisted. But in a world where trade, like almost everything else, is regulated by governments, surely it behooves those governments to work together with a decent regard for the problems of other countries.

Otherwise, the resulting trade wars could destroy the Western alliance and produce a replay of the disaster of the 1930s. The worst thing about last week's GATT meeting was not its failure to preserve a liberal world trading order in the face of adverse economic circumstances. It was the open display of mean spirits, the forceful defense of narrow, rather than enlightened, self-interest. All in all, the Geneva talks did not augur well for the Western tit Merely dividing the field into good guys and bad guys, with protectionists wearing the black hats, is too easy. The pain caused by a combination of recession, technological change and loss of markets to foreign competition is very real Look at California.

Less than a decade ago, there were five major assembly plants in the state turning out almost a million cars and trucks a year. Now, aside from one shift at General Motors' Van Nuys plant, all are closed. The same sort of fate has befallen plants producing steel, tires and electric irons, among other things. All in all, California's Employment Development Department figures that 113,000 jobs have disappeared in the last three years. While import competition is only one cause of the long lines of jobless workers all over the country, it is a major factor.

Last week's meeting of GATT, the organization's first full gathering in nine years, was called largely at the United States' behest It was supposedly intended to draw the line against the galloping forces of protectionism and, if possible, to recover some of the ground lost in recent years. President Reagan, in a radio address on the eve of the meeting, made an eloquent argument against protectionist solutions to the economic malaise now gripping the United States and other nations. But in Geneva, Switzerland, Reagan's own special trade representative found it necessary to warn this country's trading partners that the "political coalition necessary to preserve an open market in the United States is on the verge of collapse." Local-content legislation, opposed by the White House, now has an absolute majority of sponsors in the Democratic-controlled House. Such Democratic stalwarts as Sen. Ted Kennedy Of Massachusetts and former Vice President Walter F.

Mon-dale now speak the language of protectionism. Robert Strauss, who himself carried the liberal-trade banner for the Carter administration, explained the growing strength of the protectionist tide in a recent Wall Street Journal article. "To the growing ranks of disillusioned workers are now added pragmatic and responsible voices in Economists who agree on little else are of a mind on one point Tbe collapse of the international trading system, brought about by a combination of greed and panic, was a major factor in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Last week's meeting of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, made it depressingly evident that the world's major trading nations may be on the verge of committing the same folly all over again. The gathering sharply illuminated the differences between the United States and its European trading partners differences that were too great to be credibly papered over with diplomatic niceties.

After World War II, the major trading nations seemed to have learned their lesson. Trade barriers were progressively lowered on the thesis that a liberal world trading order was essential to economic growth and prosperity. And for a long time it worked. During the 1950s, the '60s and the early '70s, international trade and prosperity were locked into a beneficial circle: The more the nations of the world traded, the more prosperous they became. And the more prosperous they became, the more they traded.

As economic interdependence became a reality, about one of every six manufacturing jobs in this country depended on foreign sales. Two of every five acres of farmland produced for export The role of world trade in the economies of Japan and Western Europe became even greater. Unfortunately, it turns out that there is a bad side to such heavy dependence on trade. The world economy is in desperate straits. Unemployment is at socially dangerous levels on both sides of the Atlantic.

The international financial system is in such a precarious situation that, for the first time since the 1930s, serious people are publicly discussing its possible collapse. Under the bruising effect of these realities, protectionist forces are on the rise everywhere as governments try to stem rising unemployment in their own countries by holding down imports or, even more prevalently, by trying to get an edge in world markets by subsidizing exports. 1 -4l' 4 iiu ne5 tit i vie Jk Alii 1 Ell m. I. 1 rtf J' nt.

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