Extension of Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act

Concessions obtained in reciprocal trade agreements-number of countries granting concessions on important products and groups of products exported from the United States (not including numerous concessions obtained on a wide variety of other products)—Continued

NON-AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS-Continued

Iron and steel products except machinery and vehicles.

Iron and steel plates, sheets, bars, and rods (all iron and steel semimanufactures).

120442642235

Trucks and busses.

NON-AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS-Continued

Source: Compiled from Concessions Obtained for United States Exports by Commodity Groups in the Trade Agreements (revised), Department of Commerce; and from Concessions Obtained and Granted by Commodity Groups in the Trade Agreements With the United Kingdom and Canada, Trade Agreement With Mexico (Publication 1861) and Trade Agreement Between the United States and Iran (Publication No. 134), Department of State.

Mr. ROBERTSON. A little explanation of the trade agreement with Canada and how that affected the other British dominions and the so-called Ottawa preferences is requested by my friend from Illinois, Mr. Dewey.

Mr. SAYRE. I suppose, when one speaks of the Ottawa preferences, one must start at the beginning of the chapter, with the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930. As I explained yesterday, that Hawley-Smoot tariff raised the barriers against Canadian and other goods to such heights that members of the British Empire, including Canada, determined that the only thing to do was to raise their own tariff rates against American goods, and as a very natural sequel they gathered together in Ottawa in the year 1932, 2 years after the passage of the HawleySmoot Tariff Act, talked over the situation, made up their minds that the only relief was a system of British Empire preferences, a system which discriminates against American goods.

You see, if the United States, the most powerful and wealthiest and strongest trading nation, pursues this policy of economic nationalism, it practically forces other nations to do the same thing, so that this was a very natural consequence.

As a result of those Ottawa preferences, you had members of the British Empire lowering their tariffs against Empire goods, charging

the highest rates against American goods. That hurt us most, I suppose, with respect to Canada, because, as you know, the United Kingdom and Canada are our two largest customers. We sell more exports to those two countries than to any others. And here we were, directly hit in our Canadian and British trade, by these discriminatory measures. So that following the putting into force of the Ottawa preferences it seemed manifest that if this trade-agreements program was to be a success, if we were to win markets for American exports, we must bring down those preferences in Canada, in Great Britain, and the British colonies which operated to restrict the sale of American goods. And that we proceeded to do.

We negotiated the first Canadian trade agreement, an agreement which, until the negotiation with the British, was the most important of all our trade agreements. In that trade agreement Canada, under its terms, granted to American goods the lowest rate which it granted to any foreign nation, most-favored-foreign-nation treatment, and under that Canadian agreement, as I have already said twice before, we at once and automatically secured a reduction to minimum foreign rates of over 600 items, comprising in the past as much as 30 percent of Canada's imports from the United States. And, in addition, we obtained for many products a reduction of, or a binding of, the margin of preference in favor of Empire goods. This is tremendously important, in dollars and cents, to American export trade.

I think its consequences went far deeper than that, however. It meant the reversal of that policy of economic conflict between the United States and its best customers, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and it led to a coming together of those three countries to see if it were not possible to get through a trade agreement also with the United Kingdom, by which, again, we could reduce the barriers against American goods. And as a result of that we negotiated the United Kingdom trade agreement and a second Canadian trade-agreement; we put those two agreements through to the immense advantage of American exporters. In those agreements we made a substantial dent in the system of empire preferences which had been operating so much to the disadvantage of American exports since the Ottawa Conference.

Mr. DEWEY. How about the other members of the Ottawa Conference?

Mr. ROBERTSON. You can go ahead and answer that.

Mr. SAYRE. The Dominions, you have in mind?

Mr. DEWEY. Yes.

Mr. SAYRE. Of course the British trade agreement covered the colonies, the British colonial possessions. It did not cover the self-governing dominions, so that your question, I take it, relates to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. We have not yet succeeded in negotiating trade agreements with them. We hope to, and if Congress sees fit to continue this act, as I trust it will, I hope that we will be able to negotiate trade agreements with them. The difficulty has been, and will be, our careful concern of American producers. We run there into various competitive goods. It is a difficult problem. We are not going to go ahead unless we find a way of doing so without injuring American producers.

I think that you have put your finger on one of the important practical issues which we face. If we can go forward with the program which has been started with Canada and the United Kingdom, I think we are building fundamentally the foundation to avoid economic conflict, building for peace. If we fail to go forward, I see rocks ahead.

Mr. ROBERTSON. Doctor, in normal times isn't it true that our best customer was the United Kingdom, and our second best customer Canada?

Mr. SAYRE. Yes. It varied from year to year, sometimes one, sometimes the other.

Mr. ROBERTSON. And when we negotiated the first trade agreement with Canada, and she gave us certain concessions, we broke down a part of the empire preference known as the Ottawa pact.

Mr. SAYRE. We did, but we didn't altogether smash it.

Mr. ROBERTSON. Then, when we negotiated a trade agreement with the United Kingdom, we broke down some more of the preferences that she had given to her dominions, which had differentiated and discriminated against our imports.

Mr. SAYRE. Correct.

Mr. ROBERTSON. So that in those two trade agreements we reached a large part of this retaliatory program known as empire preference, but we haven't completed it yet with specific agreements with Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Mr. SAYRE. That is quite correct, sir, and that is one of the reasons why it is necessary, in my mind, for Congress to continue this Trade Agreements Act.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Dewey? Mr. Dewey is recognized.

Mr. DEWEY. Dr. Sayre, my questioning will be a little away from the trade agreements, but I think it has a very close bearing on the whole subject as it looks toward the future, which you are also doing, of course.

The other day I was somewhat surprised when I heard, indirectly, that the Secretary of the Treasury was appearing before an executive session of the Banking and Currency, Coinage, Weights, and Measures, and Foreign Affairs Committees. To use the vernacular, I "horned in." I was not invited, I invited myself and was not thrown out. And as I listened I was very much interested to hear him develop certain ideas of currency stabilization plans for the future.

Mr. SAYRE. Yes.

Mr. DEWEY. I am deeply interested in that subject, generally, by past study and personal experience. As the subject developed I became even more interested to note that in one section of the proposal made by the Treasury Department, in case balances of payments ran unfavorably to one of the participating countries of this fund the fund would ask them to take certain steps to correct those trade balances, which steps could only mean changes in tariffs or values of currencies.

I then obtained a copy of the so-called British White Paper which was issued by the British Treasury, and they go even further in that paper and state right out that they will recommend changes in the

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