World Trade: Tribute to Perseverance

A luscious fresco depicting The Triumph of Venus looked down upon a group of delegates from the world's most prosperous nations as they gathered last week at Le Bocage, a lakeside villa in Geneva. The serious beginning of the Kennedy Round, after weeks and months of trial and trouble, was not exactly a triumph of love, but it was certainly a tribute to perseverance.

One by one, the representatives of the Common Market, the U.S., and ten other nations faced Eric Wyndham White, the British executive secretary for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). One by one, they presented folders bearing the all-important list of goods they wish excepted from the upcoming series of tariff-cutting talks. It was, said Wyndham White, "a historic moment." Cars & Food. In history's most ambitious effort to expand world trade, the Kennedy Round aims at cutting all tariffs among the 64 members of GATT up to 50% now, and eventually eliminating them entirely. Such cuts would enable consumers in each country to buy the goods of other countries—cars, foods, watches—more cheaply, and would create a sort of "One World" of trade, encouraging both political and economic cooperation around the globe. Now Wyndham White and his staff of 130 experts face the arduous task of comparing and analyzing each country's list of exceptions before real negotiations can begin.

Though the lists are secret, their contents seeped out steadily. The Common Market, which had the longest list because of last-minute French pressure, wants to exclude about 20% of its industrial imports of $20 billion yearly.

Its list of exceptions included machine tools, electrical equipment, trucks, buses and even nuclear reactors—and compared poorly with the U.S. list which totaled only 8% of dutiable imports. Britain named coal, lead and zinc, plastic products and many cotton textiles in a list that covered 5% of its imports. Austria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland offered to slice all their tariffs in half if other nations reciprocate. And a delegate from Czechoslovakia showed up as the only Communist to offer a number of concessions that would align his country with GATT to a limited extent, thus demonstrating the shifting economic winds behind the Iron Curtain.

Farm Flap. Many uncertainties still loom over the course of the talks, and the fear is general that France may yet torpedo them over the problem of common tariffs for European agriculture. That fear was heightened last week when Italy announced that it is reluctant to agree to standardize feed-grain prices before 1970 because that would inflate Italian food bills. Coming on top of the Franco-German fight over grain prices, Italy's stand made it even more unlikely that Europe can devise a common policy by mid-December, as the French demand on pain of walking out of the Kennedy Round.