NYT:

President Lee Myung-bak confronted the biggest challenge to his young and increasingly unpopular administration Tuesday as tens of thousands of demonstrators filled central Seoul to protest his agreement to resume suspended imports of American beef and to denounce a broad range of other government policies.

The country’s entire cabinet offered to resign as a way to help Mr. Lee find a way out of the crisis. It was unclear if he would accept the resignations.

Mr. Lee’s 107-day-old government has been increasingly beset by fears that his agreement to reopen markets to American beef could expose the public to mad cow disease.

For the past 40 days, central Seoul has been rocked by demonstrations , which began as rallies by hundreds of teenage students, singing, dancing and holding candles to protest the importing of American beef. They have now evolved into a protest against government policies on education, health care and consumer prices.

NYT:

President Lee Myung-bak confronted the biggest challenge to his young and increasingly unpopular administration Tuesday as tens of thousands of demonstrators filled central Seoul to protest his agreement to resume suspended imports of American beef and to denounce a broad range of other government policies.

The country’s entire cabinet offered to resign as a way to help Mr. Lee find a way out of the crisis. It was unclear if he would accept the resignations.

Mr. Lee’s 107-day-old government has been increasingly beset by fears that his agreement to reopen markets to American beef could expose the public to mad cow disease.

For the past 40 days, central Seoul has been rocked by demonstrations , which began as rallies by hundreds of teenage students, singing, dancing and holding candles to protest the importing of American beef. They have now evolved into a protest against government policies on education, health care and consumer prices.

NYT:

President Lee Myung-bak confronted the biggest challenge to his young and increasingly unpopular administration Tuesday as tens of thousands of demonstrators filled central Seoul to protest his agreement to resume suspended imports of American beef and to denounce a broad range of other government policies.

The country’s entire cabinet offered to resign as a way to help Mr. Lee find a way out of the crisis. It was unclear if he would accept the resignations.

Mr. Lee’s 107-day-old government has been increasingly beset by fears that his agreement to reopen markets to American beef could expose the public to mad cow disease.

For the past 40 days, central Seoul has been rocked by demonstrations , which began as rallies by hundreds of teenage students, singing, dancing and holding candles to protest the importing of American beef. They have now evolved into a protest against government policies on education, health care and consumer prices.

Oxford’s Jimmy Reade makes the case for free trade in footballers, in line with previous entries in this genre by Kanika Datta and Simon Kuper.

Jagdish Bhagwati and Sandip Madan (CEO of Global Healthnet) ask for free trade in health care.

R. Dennis Olson at IATP really confuses me with this column:

The 2008 Farm Bill to be voted on by the House and Senate this week includes incremental gains for conservation, renewable energy, food aid and healthier, local food systems. However, it fails to reverse decades of deregulation that have increased agricultural market volatility to the benefit of global food corporations, and at the expense of farmers, consumers, rural communities and the environment…

These same global food corporations saw increased profits when farm prices collapsed by 40 percent after the market deregulation of the 1996 Farm Bill, and they are making even more money now that food prices have risen to crisis levels. Market deregulation in effect privatizes crucial market information, which suppresses price transparency and price discovery. This, in turn, increases the ability of big firms to manipulate prices.

I’m sorry, but what aspect of federal agricultural subsidies preclude collusive pricing? And shouldn’t the 2002 farm bill’s subsidy increases have addressed that problem? And do agro-giants really earn profits based on price volatility, making money hand over fist whether the price is low or high? What do you want the farm bill to do? Further insulate agriculture from market forces?

On the positive side of the ledger…

the Farm Bill extends the sugar program at a crucial time when it is under siege from the final phase-in of deregulation mandated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It contains a new program that would use the growing sugar surpluses created by NAFTA and other free trade agreements to supplement corn ethanol production…

We fear that the deregulation of the North American sweetener market will result in the destruction of the U.S. and Mexican sugar industries…

Oh dear, it’s becoming clear now.

WSJ:

A proposal to sweeten government support for American sugar producers is emerging as a major sticking point between Congress and the White House in final negotiations on the farm bill.

The initiative is a priority for House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat whose rural Minnesota district is among the nation’s top producers of sugar beets.

Rep. Peterson is pushing a package of proposals that would bolster the industry, including a plan to commit imported sugar to ethanol production, rather than having it sold into the consumer market, where it would compete with U.S. producers.

The Townshend Act forbade the [East India] Company frrom selling its goods directly to the colonists. Instead, the EIC had to auction merchandise to middlemen, who then shipped the caragoes to American wholeslaers, who finally sold to local shop owners. In May 1773, Parliament, at the request of the EIC, passed the Tea Act. It imposed no new taxes, but rather allowed the Company, for the first time, to import tea directly from Asia into America. The act cut the price of tea in half and was therefore a boon to colonial consumers.

The middlemen cut out by the act, local smugglers and tea merchants, were not as happy… In November 1773, the East Indiamen Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor entered Boston Harbor with the fisrt loads of the EIC’s tea. The conspirators, probably led by Samuel Adams, were well prepared and highly disciplined: they cleaned the decks when they were finished and took no tea for personal use or later sale.

— William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, 2008, p.242

HT: EconTalk

Suddenly, Japan wants the WTO to liberalize the rice market.

GAO reports:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been unable to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in antidumping (AD) and countervailing (CV) duties. The Department of Commerce imposes these duties to remedy injurious unfair foreign trade practices (unfairly low prices or subsidies). The noncollection of AD/CV duties means that the U.S. government has not fully remedied the unfair trade practices and bears a substantial loss of revenue…

While over $600 million in AD/CV duties dating back to 2001 remain uncollected, they are highly concentrated among a few products, countries of origin, and importers… [A] relatively small number of importers owe the vast majority of these uncollected duties… According to CBP officials, prospects for collecting a sizeable portion of these bills are slim, because many of the importers have disappeared, have no assets, or have declared bankruptcy…

Four key factors contribute to uncollected AD/CV duties… First, because the U.S. AD/CV duty system involves the retrospective assessment of duties, the final amount of AD/CV duties an importer owes can significantly exceed the initial amount paid when the goods entered the country. Second, companies that did not previously export products subject to AD/CV duties, i.e., “new shippers,” pose two types of risks for collections. For example, new shippers can be assigned an AD/CV duty rate based on as few as one shipment, which can significantly underestimate the final duty rate… Third, all importers must provide a general bond to secure the payment of all types of duties, but CBP’s standard practice for setting the amount of this bond inadequately protects AD/CV duty revenue… Fourth, CBP collects minimal information regarding importers and does not conduct background or financial checks, which creates challenges to locating importers and collecting AD/CV duties.

What should we be paying more for? “Approximately 84 percent of the total amount of uncollected AD/CV duties is associated with four products, all from China: crawfish tail meat, garlic, honey, and mushrooms.”

I can’t say I’m too upset.

[HT: H&R]