US Blocking Costa Rican Sugar Trade To Force IP Laws

For the last couple of days news has been trickling in about how the US is trying to ram IP laws down Costa Rica's throat by blocking their access to the US sugar market. Techdirt has a good summary of the various commentaries and a related scoop in the Bahamas where the US is also applying IP pressure. "The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of 'free trade' — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It's blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws."

Comments

Color me underwhelmed.

[demonlapin]

US pushes around Central American country and gets away with it because we are their biggest market. Gee, that's only been the story of, what, the past 150 years?

Re:Color me underwhelmed.

[dkleinsc]

Quite a bit longer than 150 years, and usually we push them around by military means as much as economic. Hence our repeated invasions of most of the countries in Latin America, as well as not infrequent support of coup attempts.

As Maj Gen Smedley Butler put it back in the 1930's, when this sort of thing was in full swing:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

It's history like that, by the way, that makes accusations that the US supported the coup against Hugo Chavez carry significant weight (whether true or not).

Free trade not free property

[forand]

While I believe I agree with you in general sentiment, that is that US IP laws are so long term and non permissive as to be more a hinderance to development than an incentive; the statement in the summary, quoted below makes no sense.

I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of "free trade" — gets included in free trade agreements.

Intellectual property laws being uniform across a free trade so is REQUIRED for free trade of intellectual property and clearly not 'the exact opposite of free trade.' If laws differed between member nations then one nation would be able to use intellectual property to manufacture their goods which was prohibited by other members thus creating an unfair advantage. This would be most dramatic if the intellectual property was produced in one nation under its laws then used without license by another nation to effectively eliminate the benefits of the intellectual property protects. These protections are for the creators not for the nations (thus not protectionist in the traditional sense). Free trade is to stop nations from creating safe havens for their producers by erecting unfair barriers to trade not to allow anyone to take whatever IP they want and use it as they see fit.

Re:Level playing field

[xs650]

"Why these trade rules aren't being used to enforce environmental agreements and not IP ones is somewhat beyond me."

Because the US doesn't want to upgrade to Costa Rican environmental standards.

Re:Never Fear!!!!

[DriedClexler]

You joke, but that was my reaction: "The US government is making my sugar more expensive? Oh noes! Maybe now I'll have to pay 205% of the world market price for it instead of the usual 200! And maybe 99% of the crap we eat will be infested with HFCS instead of just 98%. What EVER will we do..."

Re:Never Fear!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawaii is not a large producer of sugar anymore -all but one grower has shut down (and only one grower of pinneapple remains).
The US is not a large importer of sugar because we grow enough to export and don't use as much per capita as many other areas (EU, India, etc.).
There is no tariff on sugar from Costa Rica for the first 19,225 metric tons (2007 data).
Sugar is not Costa Rica's main export - far from it - less than 2% of the agriculture exports.
Sugar is fungible - if they don't sell to us, they can sell to others.
Corn syrup is cheaper than cane sugar for us to produce. In Brazil, the opposite is true. That's due to environment and cultural and many other reasons.

Re:"Free" like I say

[afidel]

This is why a standing army is a bad thing mkay. There's a reason the founding fathers didn't make any structure for it in the constitution and in fact wrote quite strongly against it. It's a lot harder to suppress the populace if you have to raise your army from their ranks.

Re:Never Fear!!!!

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

The US is not a large importer of sugar because we grow enough to export

check yor facts. the US is _not_ an exporter of proccessed sugar. not of the sugarcane variety, not of the beet variety

There is no tariff on sugar from Costa Rica for the first 19,225 metric tons

which means theres still a tariff. where's the fabled "free market", then ?

Corn syrup is cheaper than cane sugar for us to produce.

because of high levels of subsidy from the federal government. take those away and imported sugar from brasil, thailand, etc. becomes cheaper, even factoring transport costs.

USA is the hypocritical of all countries when the subject is international trade. when in benefits the US, lets all "free trade", but when it steps on a few lobbists toes, it's heavy tariffs here, restrictions there, sanctions somewhere else.

no wonder developing nations are more and more trading between themselves than with US.

[citation needed] ? here it is (in portuguese). to sum it up, china is now brasils larget comercial partner. all asian nations togheter now respond for 30% of our exports. in my 35 years of life i saw the importance of the US as a trade partner drop from more than 40% of our comerce to less than 12%. some of this change can be attributed to the growth of asian nations, but some of them you can put on american atitude too.

oh, and sorry for the harshness of this post. mod me as a troll, but sometimes things have to be said.

Re:Never Fear!!!!

[Raptoer]

Ignoring contaminates, HFCS used in the majority of products is a mixture of about 50% glucose and 50% fructose (Both monosacharides). Sucrose (table sugar) is a disacharide made up of one glucose and one fructose bonded. Our body ends up having to break up the sucrose into glucose and fructose in order to process it, so mostly there is no difference between the two.

There are three possible reasons that HFCS is worse than table sugar
- HFCS doesn't require sucrase (the enzyme that breaks sucrose into the two monosacharides). This means that a person could ingest the same amounts of HFCS and sucrose, but get more energy out of the HFCS, because he doesn't have enough sucrase to break all of the sucrose up. I have no idea what the amount of sucrose we can process at once is though.

-HFCS has to go through more chemical processing than table sugar, leading to the potentiality of additional contaminates.

-Finally HFCS is CHEAP. That is the main difference, a food maker can easily put more in to make their product more appealing why leaving the price pretty low.

OT: What YRO means

[freeweed]

For the thousandth time, it's clearly "Your Rights" Online, not Your "Rights Online".

Or, if you prefer, think of it with a comma - Your Rights, Online.

Every non-Internet story has comments like yours; you'd think after a few hundreds stories like this you'd figure it out ;)