Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Monday, Oct. 21, 2002

China is required under WTO rules to drop certain tariffs, making it easier for exporters to ship their goods to China, but after dropping tariffs, China erected a new wall between exporters and access to the Chinese market by encasing it in miles of red tape.

According to Forbes magazine, "China's admission to the WTO was supposed to be a boon for ranchers and farmers around the world; the U.S., for instance, was expected to sell an additional $2 billion a year in farm products to China by 2005.

"That's not going to happen," a Western agriculture expert in Beijing told Forbes.

What did happen, James Sumner, president of the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council told Forbes, is that U.S. poultry producers have lost about $200 million in business to China this year because of red tape and other nontariff barriers.

And it happened because "China's adherence to the deal has been pretty dicey," Phillip Laney, the country director for China for the American Soybean Association told Forbes. "They're playing technical games."

One good example is chicken feet, a throw-away item in the U.S., but a delicacy in China.

But the feet aren’t moving, Forbes explains, because suddenly routine import licenses for them carry restrictions and take two weeks to process instead of the previous two days.

In the nine months since China joined the WTO, China's agriculture imports from the U.S. have dropped - down 23 percent to $841 million for the first six months of this year - the first such decline since 1990.

Dramatic Drop

The drop in U.S. exports of soybeans has been dramatic, falling 42 percent from the 2001 period, to $376 million, Forbes revealed, because our soybeans are genetically modified despite the fact that in recent years China had imposed no restrictions on genetically modified crops.

Moreover, China is second only to the U.S. in agricultural biotech-research spending. But Chinese officials suddenly became concerned about modified beans around the time of China’s entry the WTO. "We're not talking about tofu ingredients here," Forbes explained. "American soybeans are sold to chicken and pig farmers as protein supplements."

"We worked exhaustively to get China into the WTO because it's such a potentially great market, and we expected a good faith effort to comply with WTO rules, but we've come face to face with artificial trade barriers," Illinois Farm Bureau President Ron R. Warfield told Forbes.

China insists that it is complying with WTO rules. It has cut tariffs, reduced the number of goods for which import licenses are required and written new laws to open service trades, Gao Yan, speaking for the ministry of foreign trade told Forbes.

But there’s that red tape working against such imports as corn and chicken: