In a closed-door meeting with some of global agriculture’s biggest players, U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman offered to cut American farm subsidies 60 percent in five years if other major ag players like the European Union and Japan lowered their ag import tariffs 55 to 90 percent.

In short, explained Portman to the slack-jawed group, the U.S. was “offering real cuts to U.S. farmers in exchange for market access” to other nations’ dinner plates.

Well, not exactly.

Some of the proposed cuts, as many trade watchers quickly pointed out, were more like a shell game: Portman proposed to move the 2002 Farm Bill’s counter-cyclical payments from one trade-distorting box, amber, to another less trade-distorting box, blue. (It’s a slick move, but a move the WTO has already ruled illegal.)

If Portman and the White House hoped to create buzz with the offer, they succeeded - especially with the truest believers in the amen corner of American ag policy. The American Farm Bureau called the Oct. 10 proposal “bold action;” the National Pork Producers Council labeled it “ambitious.”

Others in the usually harmonious bunch, however, kept their eyes on the pea. They saw the sleight of hand and reacted swiftly. The American Soybean Assoc. called Portman’s idea a “credible signal.” Then, with Luther-like nerve, it informed trade pope Portman that his deal didn’t deal with the “81 percent of the world’s population” now living in “developing countries... (that) are the markets of the future.”

Golly, the White House must have overlooked that fine point. The National Association of Wheat Growers warned Portman and the Bush Administration that any plan like Oct. 10’s to “unilaterally disarm” U.S. farmers and ranchers was “difficult to envision... when faced with yet unknown highs in fuel and other input costs and low market prices coupled with continued trade challenges...”

The crack in the mainline farm groups’ normally solid free trade front is not new. For years it has been whitewashed over with silly American free-trade-will-make-us-millionaires bragging and the endless yak, yak, yakking of World Trade Organization negotiations.

Now, however, the yakking must turn into yielding. The December WTO ministerial in Hong Kong is viewed as the make-or-break meeting to get global trade talks, already a year behind the original January 2005 deadline, back on track. As such, an ag agreement is job one and Portman views himself as the man for the job.

But Portman’s offer - really the White House’s offer - to get the stalled talks moving is more of a head fake than an honest step forward. Would any American farmer or rancher with an IQ anywhere north of zero give away 60 percent of their potential farm program subsidies - upwards of $12 to $14 billion a year in hard cash under the 2002 Farm Bill - for something as soft and nebulous as “market access” five years from now?

Not on your life and, as the soybean boys correctly point out, the vaunted “access” the Bushies seek doesn’t even include a vague promise of open doors to developing nations that hold the largest American farm export potential.

The White House and Portman have other, closer-to-home, problems, also. When the Administration greenlighted Portman in Geneva, yellow lights began flashing in Congress. Old ag bulls on Capitol Hill were greatly displeased to see the foundation for their 2007 Farm Bill being dug in Switzerland.

“Let me be clear,” scolded Senate Ag Chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, in an Oct. 9 letter to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, “...I am deeply concerned the Administration is using the current negotiations to reshape farm policy without the full input of Congress and grassroots support.”

No question. And it’s also using current WTO talks to preposition itself against another disaster - one it sees coming for a change - Hong Kong.