But I also later learned that just because your costs in the U. S. are high doesn't mean that the situation can't be remedied. Del Monte switched pineapple production to the Phillipines and to Kenya when the Hawaiian production became uncompetitive. The oil companies and the mining companies searched the world for new low cost reserves and the large ships revolutionized the cost of transportation. General Electric employs a broad range of strategies to keep their costs competitive - huge investments to increase productivity in domestic plants where this can pay off - foreign sourcing - border plants - trading companies - barter - joint ventures with foreign partners. There are better answers than helpless handwringing or frantic appeals to the government for relief. From my experience in Utah International I learned that it is a wonderful thing to be the world's lowest-cost producer. But I also learned that governments play a special role in international trade and foreign investment and that governments can act unwisely and against their own long-range best interests by yielding to short-run pressures. For example, after OPEC raised the price of oil the Australian Commonwealth enacted export licensing to force up the prices being received for its coal exports. In so doing the effect was to abrogate all the long-term supply contracts and to send the Japanese scurrying to establish new alternate sources of supplies even if they paid more for the coal. This brought into being surplus capacity and now the Japanese buyers can dictate the price, not bureaucrats in Canberra. My experience as a member of the presidentially appointed Commission on Foreign Trade and Investment was revealing. For fourteen months in 1970-71 we labored - we really worked hard. We read thousands of pages of reports prepared by specialists in the field, listened to days of expert testimony, spent two months drafting a report, arguing it out almost word by word until the language could be endorsed by the majority of the commission whose membership was drawn from representatives of business, agriculture, academe, and organized labor. The individual commissioners were all very diligent with two exceptions. The two labor representatives never bothered to attend unless a labor economist was testifying. Yet they filed the only dissenting report. 3.