The mail.(Letter to the Editor)

I had just been reading Capital Press, a Northwest newspaper covering agricultural business, before picking up the June issue and finding the article by Douglas Irwin, "Does International Trade Kill Good American Jobs?" 1 had never connected the problems that fruit and vegetable growers were facing here with that of other low paying jobs until I read his article. We apple and asparagus growers are another industry that uses low pay, unskilled labor, and we have seen our markets decimated by imports from China, South America, and New Zealand.

Blake Hurst also pointed out in "The Free-Trade Movement's Achilles Heel" that what has sent growers from our country to South America is, in part, the cost of land here. A neighbor of mine who had been farming 1,000 acres with his own carrot-packing line sold it and moved his operation to Brazil. We all thought that it was because of lower labor costs there, but Mr. Hurst explained that the major differential is die cost of land, which is inflated in part by farm subsidies.

I might have been saddened for the future of agriculture in the United States by what I read, but I was glad to at least see it explained in a publication with as broad a readership as TAE.

Jan Dorman

Mesa, Washington

As a business writer and college instructor I'm not quite as blithe as Karl Zinsmeister (BIRD'S EYE, June) about the long-term risks (and possible unintended consequences) of globalization. But his column is the most coherent riposte I've yet seen against the gloom-and-doom crowd.

I especially liked the "can't have it both ways" paradox he spells out on page seven. It's as succinct a statement as I've ever seen describing the corner into which critics of capitalism have painted themselves on the question of how international trade affects the Third World.