No Third Arrow

As an ardent free-trader, it gives me no pleasure at all to have been right over the extension of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to include Japan. What I can't understand is why Japan agreed to put everything on the table, and then just a few months later refuses to negotiate over its agricultural tariffs, including the crazy 777 percent levy on imported rice. Well, I do understand that in apparently changing his mind Shinzo Abe is making a carefully orchestrated domestic gesture, probably because he thinks that the American administration will be unable to get a TPP treaty through Congress without a TPA (Trade Promotion Authority), and there is no point in spending his precious, and limited, political capital and getting nothing in return. In fact, Abe has already gone a long way towards dismantling the agricultural regime that …Read More »