Various government agencies maintain an array of export assistance programs. These programs raise the question of why overseas marketing and lending and other export assistance should be a government rather than private sector function.
As regular beneficiaries of double standards, big business executives and lobbyists, it seems, are without a sense of irony. How do the corporate proponents of international trade agreements designed to promote misnamed “free trade” explain their simultaneous support for marketing subsidies? If it is only on the grounds that “other countries do the same thing,” perhaps they should turn their multinational lobbying prowess to eliminating other countries’ export assistance programs.
The most disturbing feature of many of the export assistance programs may be that the assisted companies export troublesome products or technologies—weapons, or environmentally hazardous equipment, for example. Such programs, especially the various private corporate arms exports initiatives supported by the Defense Department, should be ended.
The United States spends billions in a panoply of programs and agencies to support corporate commercial arms exports, according to the World Policy Institute’s William Hartung. The Pentagon maintains a large bureaucracy devoted to promoting sales of military hardware by U.S. corporations to foreign governments. The Defense Department spends millions at military air shows to hawk the arms makers’ wares, and it spends billions of dollars on loans, grants, credits, and cash payments to enable foreign governments to buy U.S. weapons.74 Surely there are more efficient ways for the government to invest money if it is only concerned with creating jobs.75
Of course, weapons are not innocuous products, and there are severe costs to an arms exports policy driven by commercial impulses. Former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias has noted that the defense industry’s weapons-pushing destabilizes countries and regions, as with respect to the removal of the ban on the sale of high-tech weapons to Latin America. The repeal of the ban was the direct result of industry lobbying. According to Arias, it “will certainly impede our efforts to break the vicious cycle of poverty and militarism.”76
Commercial weapons exports may also undermine U.S. national security and humanitarian interests. As former Senator Mark Hatfield stated in 1995, “We can still enumerate dozens of cases where the transfer of U.S. military hardware has resulted in the misuse of those weapons, including human rights abuses and in the conduct of acts of aggression. Even more horrible is the fact that U.S. financed or provided arms have been used against our own soldiers in Haiti, Somalia, Panama, and Iraq.”77
Why should the Pentagon subsidize commercial arms exports that may end up in the hands of dictators, may end upset regional stability, or which may be used against U.S. soldiers?
Other government export programs have been the target of more sustained public and Congressional outrage, which has led to some partial but still inadequate reforms.
The Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program, once known as McNuggets for the World for its support of McDonald’s advertising (when it was formerly the Market Promotion Program), is a $90-million-a-year program which is now limited to support of marketing efforts by farmer cooperatives and trade associations. The benign-sounding category of cooperatives, suggestive of small farmer arrangements, includes such operations as Sunkist and Ocean Spray, which are well able to afford their own advertising campaigns.78
Again, the Market Access Program and similar programs raise difficult questions: Why is export assistance a proper government function? Why does the market fail to provide incentives for advertising, lending, or other functions? And if businesses determine that a particular activity is not market-worthy, what public interest is served by the government filling the vacuum? If export assistance from other nations is the primary rationale for U.S. activities, how serious are efforts to negotiate an international agreement to curtail such programs? Finally, does the government receive an adequate return on its investment?