August 30, 2010
The Washington Post told readers that the Korean trade pact would raise the price of hogs by $10 each, roughly a 20 percent increase. The context was a claim that the pact would be very important to Indiana farmers. If this is true, then it implies that the Korean trade pact will put serious upward pressure on food prices in the United States.
It is extremely unlikely that more open agricultural trade with a relatively small market could have such a dramatic impact on farm prices. More likely, it is one of the nonsense stories that proponents of trade pacts routinely circulate with the expectation that news outlets like the Washington Post will repeat them unquestioningly. Of course a serious newspaper would point out the implications of such a claim, if it were true.
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