A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Long before this week's dustup, America's trade history with Mexico was complicated. In fact, tariffs are just one way to block trade. As Jeff Guo and Erika Beras from our Planet Money podcast show us, trade barriers take many forms.
BRYAN WADA: Here we are.
ERIKA BERAS, BYLINE: We recently found ourselves with potatoes piled 18 feet high - 15 million potatoes.
WADA: It's a little muddy here so...
BERAS: Oh, my goodness.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: This is literally a mountain.
BERAS: It's a wall of potato.
GUO: We were in Pingree, Idaho, with Bryan Wada. Bryan's a potato farmer, who sells to just about everywhere and everyone, from Walmart to McDonald's.
BERAS: But for 26 years, there was a place his potatoes did not go to - Mexico, even though there was a free trade agreement.
WADA: That's an untapped country. And so how many times are you going to get a great marketplace that has a high population base that has never had U.S. potatoes, for the most part?
GUO: The problem was this technicality, this kind of loophole in the rules of free trade. Because when two countries sign a free trade agreement, it's not like they just flip a switch and start trading. There's all these regulations that need to be worked out.
BERAS: That's where Matt Lantz came in. He's a trade consultant hired by the potato industry. He says of all the things he's worked on, this battle was the fight of his life.
MATT LANTZ: I went from trying to promote democracy and political party-building in Russia to potatoes.
BERAS: What was harder?
LANTZ: Maybe potatoes. I don't know (laughter).
GUO: Matt says one of the basic rules of international trade is that countries have a right to protect themselves from invasive pests and diseases.
BERAS: And so in the 1990s, after NAFTA was signed and the U.S. was sending fresh potatoes to Mexico, Mexico started complaining that those potatoes had too many pests.
GUO: Mexico said American potatoes could only be sent to this small region along the border.
LANTZ: There are border checkpoints outside of that border region, and they would stop the potatoes from going any further.
GUO: It was like a potato DMZ.
LANTZ: Yeah. That's exactly what it was.
BERAS: Matt says, yes, American potatoes did have some of the pests that Mexico was complaining about, and those pests could potentially devastate Mexico's crops.
GUO: But the Mexican inspectors seemed to be going a little too far. They were sending back hundreds of potato shipments, claiming they were finding all kinds of viruses and funguses and insects.
LANTZ: So this is getting silly.
GUO: It does sound like maybe it's not really about the pests in the first place.
LANTZ: Yes.
BERAS: Matt says it sure seems like Mexico was using these pest complaints as an excuse to protect their own potato farmers from competition - as a sneaky form of economic protectionism.
LANTZ: And it wasn't just Mexico. This was happening all over the world. Quarantine issues were becoming the new way - the nontariff barrier, the new way of keeping - any product you didn't want in your country, you would just say there's a quarantine issue and you wouldn't let it in, and that would prevent market access.
GUO: As free trade was opening up in the 1990s, more and more countries started accusing each other of playing games with these pest regulations. This technicality had become a trade loophole.
BERAS: And the drama between Mexico and the U.S. over potatoes continued for years. It wasn't until 2022, nearly three decades after NAFTA, that American potatoes were fully allowed in Mexico. So when we visited Bryan Wada's farm and saw his millions of potatoes, we knew that at long last, some of those are bound for Mexico.
GUO: So should we say goodbye to these potatoes?
BERAS: Let's say goodbye.
GUO: (Laughter).
BERAS: I'm Erika Beras.
GUO: I'm Jeff Guo, NPR News.
BERAS: Goodbye potatoes.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAS TRES ABEJAS' "NOCHE NEGRA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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