Efforts to End Trade Sanctions Gathering Steam

by Jim Lobe

Considered dormant earlier this year, the campaign may yet persuade Congress to pass a bill making unilateral sanctions more difficult to enact before it adjourns for the November elections, according to Capitol Hill aides.

"This issue has legs," says one Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill. "There's a lot more concern up here about how U.S. companies are losing markets for no apparent reason."

The immediate catalyst for the change of fortunes has been the sweeping economic sanctions levelled against India and Pakistan for conducting nuclear tests last month. The detonations triggered the application of a 1994 nuclear non-proliferation law designed to deter aspiring nuclear powers from testing.

While America's economic interests in the subcontinent are relatively small compared to other regions, India, with one of the world's largest middle classes, is regarded as a key "emerging market" for U.S. companies. Pakistan is a buyer of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. agricultural commodities which are often purchased with the help of government credits.

U.S. grain farmers, who saw prices for their crops plummet after the sanctions were announced, quickly pressed lawmakers to change the law to give Clinton the power to exempt their exports.

Clinton himself has made it clear he sympathizes with the farmers' plight. "Cutting off the supply (of U.S. wheat) will only hurt the citizens of Pakistan and American farmers, without further our goals of nonproliferation of atomic weapons," he says.

Powerful U.S. business interests, representing virtually all of multinational corporations, coalitions like the elite Business Roundtable and the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) view the India-Pakistan sanctions as an opportunity to press their case against all unilateral sanctions.

They have been helped by the fact that Washington's allies in the industrialized world have not followed the U.S. lead by imposing sanctions of their own.

For the past year, these groups have publicized a series of studies which found U.S. business has been losing as much as $20 billion a year in export opportunities as a result of more than 100 unilateral sanctions laws directed against more than 70 countries around the world.

"If you take on each of the specific sanctions bills -- Cuba, Iran, India, Pakistan -- all of the supporters of each of these are in a coalition against the whole business," Lugar told the Journal of Commerce last month.

If passed, however, the bill could well apply to pending legislation designed to punish foreign countries allegedly engaged in religious persecution. Both the business community and the Clinton administration strongly oppose the proposal.