Elastomers, Like Gomez, Slacken, Stretch and Give

At last. The longed for, pleaded for, ever-so-painstakingly thrashed-out gift of a Free Trade Agreement with the United States is ours, and everybody is terrified: the livestock farmers, the dairy producers, the flower growers, the drug manufacturers, the television soap stars, the chicken breeders, the egg producers, the textile manufacturers, the traders of cana flecha handicrafts and the teamsters. The aforementioned suffer – as we all do – from the neglected highway infrastructure. Everybody complains, claiming they are not prepared. And it’s obvious that they couldn’t possibly be prepared: Defenseless primitives never are prepared when faced with developed nations (nations that developed under the behind the bulwark of protectionism). The only one who seems satisfied is Dr. Hernando Jose Gomez, chief pimp, who oversaw the two countries’ painful coupling. Painful because it is against nature, like penetration without Vaseline – the impaling, as I wrote here a few months ago, of a powerful economy bristling with subsidies and protections into another – ours – helpless and naked. Gomez assures us that, according to the experience of other countries in the hemisphere that have signed FTAs with the United States, “as a minimum, and in the worst case, they have seen an increase of 25 percent in exportations to that market within the first year.” (El Tiempo, 30 April 2012)

And what about imports? The U.S. president – who is even more content than Gomez – said, a few days ago, that these treaties are signed in order to favor his country, not others. Which is natural. Colombia has already, in the last ten years, gone from being an exporter of food products to being an importer: rice, corn, fish, meat, potatoes. Now these items will be imported in even greater quantities, without tariffs or quotas. Coffee? Yes, even coffee. The United States will have the right to export the coffee it imports from Vietnam and the Ivory Coast! Sugar. And, of course, drugs (the legal ones).

Faced with this, what exports is anyone talking about? Gomez is a little vague on this topic in his interview with El Tiempo, offering only “… lines of products for the home … curtains, towels, table linen, … good possibilities in cosmetics … women’s pants that contain elastomers .…”

It would seem that Colombia, and the depressed Coffee-Growers Axis in particular, is a world power in the production of elastomers. Which are, as readers must undoubtedly be aware, those polymers that demonstrate elastic behavior: They loosen, they slacken, they stretch, they “give.” A good example of the product might be the doctor’s own gaping gullet. He is currently the Chief Negotiator of the FTA with the U.S., and, in his eight years (eight!) negotiating and renegotiating the treaty, the doctor continually ceded ceding ground and backtracked, agreeing to each of the increasing demands of the opposing party – the Americans – without securing anything in returning. (I don’t know if he even asked for anything.)

But one wonders if table linen and towels and those elastomers with all their give will be enough to substitute for what will be lost in other areas. I’ll give just one example: The president of Fedegan (the Colombian Livestock Farmers Federation) Jose Felix Lafaurie announced the impending ruin of livestock farmers, based upon the experience of other countries subject to their respective FTAs of stingy trade. He indicated that in Mexico, as a consequence of the NAFTA treaty that put local production in unfair competition with the hyper-subsidized U.S. livestock industry, out of the 180,000 breeders on record ten years ago, only 148,000 are left. Lafaurie is anguished at the thought of the catastrophe that might come to pass in Colombia where there are “more than 400,000” small producers who “don’t even have 50 animals [each].”

That’s only the livestock industry. But agriculture is in the same boat -- even the potato. Not so long ago it was announced that within a few years only one of the 10,000 varieties of potato that existed during the Incan era would be left: the Ohioan potato. The same will happen with corn. And this is all taking place in rural regions where Colombian violence is born, where young people find no sources of work beyond the guerrilla groups, the paramilitaries, the bacrim (emerging criminal bands) or the Armed Forces. All these groups will, of necessity, grow.

With such a perspective ahead of us, it’s understandable that President Juan Manual Santos has taken to proposing the legalization of the drugs currently prohibited by the United States. They are the only Colombian agricultural export that will continue to be profitable, for two reasons. One is that, except for marijuana, there is no competition in the U.S. agricultural sector. The other reason is that they are the only things not to have been handed over with abandon by Gomez during his negotiation of the FTA.