Thank you for your question.
As I was trying to explain in here, flexibility is what we need to be thinking about.
The World Trade Organization is there. The disputes, as we know, are not going anywhere. They go to the end of the dispute process, and then they get appealed into the void.
Previous witnesses before this committee have said that the old rules order is in a lot of trouble. The United States has pretty much put the final nail in that coffin.
The compromise is that we have to accept that.... I understand there are issues around durum access, for example, in Italy, but for the Italians, it is a reasonable policy that they want to use Italian durum wheat first. We talked about breakfast cereals here; it is a reasonable policy. It's maybe not ideal, or optimal, as they say in market terms, but these are political realities that we have to deal with. People have democratic, political realities. They want to develop their own industry. They can't be having someone from, say, the trade law department of your government saying constantly, “Well, we can't do that, because it says you can't do that here in this agreement,” which nobody is really enforcing anymore because the rules are in flux.
If we're going to survive this period, we obviously have to work with like-minded governments. There's a rise of authoritarianism around the world, and we can't be working toward that direction, but we can work with like-minded governments on compromise around trade policy—negotiated outcomes, maybe, more so than rigid dispute settlements that result in the rules being followed to a T, with everyone trying to benefit as much as they can and work through how they're going to produce jobs here and basically govern in the way they see fit.
