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Politically powerful Community farmers -- 11 million strong out of a total population of 340 million -- are fighting a remarkably effective rearguard action. Nowhere is their clout more in evidence than in France. With good reason, President Francois Mitterrand fears that giving in to the U.S. will inflame the truculent farm lobby and damage his faltering Socialist Party's prospects in legislative elections next March. Luc Guyau, president of the French federation of farmers' unions, warns that the French President had better stay his course. "We will put ourselves in the front lines," he says.
But France seems increasingly lonely. Though it claims support from Italy, Spain and Belgium, its isolation deepened when the E.C.'s point man in the agriculture negotiations, commissioner Ray MacSharry of Ireland, resigned, blaming E.C. Commission President Jacques Delors for excessive sympathy for his fellow French. The chief farm negotiator eventually resumed his duties, but only after apparently winning support to conduct the talks without interference.
As both sides calm down and return to the negotiating table, Washington enjoys the upper hand. "On this case the U.S. is right," says Gary Hufbauer, a trade specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, voicing a widely held judgment among economists. Still, no one can deny that the U.S. zealously protects its domestic sugar, peanut and tobacco industries, among others. U.S. farmers retain considerable political power themselves: one of their lobbies reportedly twice foiled a GATT deal just as the two sides had come close to an agreement.
Advocates on both sides of the subsidy issue acknowledge that in the long run, free trade benefits everyone. Seven successful GATT negotiations since 1947 have helped lift global commerce from $57 billion to nearly $3.5 trillion. The U.S. and the E.C. may very well patch together a compromise. "My prediction is that France will back off just enough to make a deal possible," said Lawrence Veit, international economist at Brown Bros. Harriman & Co. in New York City.
It will probably fall to Bill Clinton to work out the details, since a final resolution is not likely before he takes office. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a spokesman warned that if foreign countries failed to open their markets, the U.S. would "get tough." Like Carla Hills before him, though, Bill Clinton can only hope that he never has to make good on the threat.