So I'm not sure about the rules in this section but this is a netflix video, if its not good to post those please close thread.
Rotten | Netflix Official Site
Spoilers for those without netflix:
Honey has increased in demand recently, officially supply hasn't increased to meet that demand but somehow there is enough honey to go around. Chinese companies have been using rice syrup to create fake honey (and exporters/importers also cut honey with other stuff) this cheap honey put lots of American honey producers out of business, China was dumping shit honey basically.
US gov put higher tariffs on chinese honey and suddenly chinese honey exports dropped but honey exports from nearby countries increased a lot. Luckily there are methods to detect this fake honey and tariffs can be expanded to cover honey exports from the surrogate countries chinese honey comes from. Some of this low quality honey has chemicals unsafe for human consumption.
I post this as a very top level basic understanding of why we need tariffs in trade - to protect domestic markets, producers and consumers from lower quality products. Obviously it's not black and white but it might help dispel the belief held by neoliberals/free market advocates that tariffs are bad.
+ if you don't care about politics/economics and all you want to see is bees doing their thing, it's a good video for that and general big scale honey production
Uh, no. Tariffs are certainly not the answer here and most certainly do not stop fraud, which is what it is when you pretend something is something it's not.
My cut down version of event's isn't fully representative of the event's in the video - my bad for omitting info
The tariffs were an answer to the chinese dumping cheap honey causing big issues for the US honey industry, at the time of the tariffs there was no way to detect whether or not the honey was legit since, according to the video, the syrup which was later revealed to be from rice wasn't easy to detect apparently.
More generally, another situation where protective tariffs would have been helpful was china dumping steel last year; the EU tried to impliment protective tariffs but Cameron opposed the tariffs, because of that European steel plants had big problems. British advocates for chinese free trade claimed that british steel was high quality enough to distinguish itself and justify the price, I don't buy this hocus.
I think tariffs in general are useful for trade with china since they have lower standards/pay for workers and lower environmental protections, so they can easily out compete domestic industries. Furthermore selling at a loss/artifically low price (dumping) as china was with honey and steel is pretty strong implication china is not a free market so, imo, in most cases free trade with them is ruinous.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I was tryna make op short and without too much wall of text
anyone who has ever been involved in business with the chinese on any level, knows they are probably the most unscrupulous people on the face of the planet. Just completely untrustworthy, and you can forget about being able to sue because you will do nothing but spin your wheels and burn money trying to get justice a date. The problem is additonally compounding that no one wants to stop doing business with the chinese because nowhere else on earth can rival such productivity and low labor and materials cost, even if the end product is of a much less quality or less consistent quality - big businesses dont give a shit about that, they care about the bottom line and china has no rivals here. Its a juggernaut of factories, low wages and cheap materials. Seriously, every industry you can think of, most businesses will eventually outsource to china, despite the lack of trust and inconsistent quality of products.
This reminds me of the rice that was made out of plastic bags. Also made in the Asian area.
And the gutter oil thing
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