A Chicken in Every Garage
By EDUARDO PORTER, NY TIMES

From afar, the rise and fall of the sport utility vehicle might look like the clear-cut story of two gas prices. With unleaded gas dropping below $1 a gallon in the years following the 1980 oil crisis, Detroit successfully made the pitch that trucks conceived for life on a farm were a good way to move the family around in suburbia. Today, with gas reluctantly receding to $3.50 a gallon, the idea makes no sense at all.

But the Ford F-Series pickup did not rule the roost as the nation’s best-selling vehicle, on an annual basis, from 1981 to last year just because gas was cheap. Its ascent required a helping hand from Uncle Sam. As Washington scrambles for a policy to achieve the incompatible goals of making fuel cheaper and making Americans use less of it, it might consider the twisted tale of how four-wheel-drive gas hogs became Detroit’s best sellers.

It started in 1961 with chicken. Trying to stop a surge of chicken imports into Germany, the European Common Market bowed to the European poultry lobby and almost tripled the tariff on frozen chicken from the United States. Washington, of course, struck back. In 1963, it raised tariffs on a range of European products: brandy to hit the French; dextrine, a food and glue component, to hit the Dutch.

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