[RC_ITR]

The Chicken Wars brought the powerful agricultural lobby in France into direct conflict with the powerful agricultural lobby in the United States. Not surprisingly, France, the largest poultry producer in the EEC, was unwilling to embrace a free trade policy whose benefits would be spread among consumers throughout Europe. The benefits of protectionism were concentrated in France and the costs were borne by consumers throughout Europe. Indeed, the stakes were sufficiently high that France might have quit the EEC had not French agricultural interests been appeased.

That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.

[vilaca]

> benefits would be spread among consumers throughout Europe

The EU has banned poultry meat from the US on psytosanitary grounds for more than two decades.

[Jon_Lowtek]

Which is a lot younger than the chicken tax from the 1960s

For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.

[w0mbat]

The US also has more lax rules than Europe has governing what food chickens can be fed. Without going into the rather revolting details, this is a legitimate reason to exclude US chicken.

[colejohnson66]

Yes, but I meant lobbying from Ford for said tariff as you suggested.

[RC_ITR]

At the same time, the U.S. auto industry was suffering its own trade crisis due to competition from growingly popular foreign cars and trucks. During the early 1960s, sales of Volkswagens surged as America’s love affair with the iconic VW “Bug” coupe and Type 2 van shifted into overdrive. By 1963, the situation got so bad that Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers Union (U.A.W.), threatened a strike that would have halted all U.S. auto production just before the 1964 presidential election.

Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.

While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.

https://www.thoughtco.com/chicken-tax-4159747

[e4e78a06]

"American-made" = all the labor-intensive parts are made abroad and only the final car is assembled in the US. The USMCA merely requires that a majority or plurality (depending on the item) of item content come from a member nation.

If there was a war American industry would shut down overnight.