While there are international trade groups and treaties you may see that individual countries still create b

Question

While there are international trade groups and treaties you may see that individual countries still create barriers to open and what is properly called "FREE TRADE." Why is this?

Answer 1

because they are stupid. Politicians suck up to special interest groups that benefit, or think they will, such as steel producers who want restrictions on imports of steel or farmers who want restrictions on imports of food. These guys have votes or money but the home consumers suffer as well as the rest of the world.

Answer 2

Free trade would mean that there are no barriers in the trade between countries.

Barriers and reasons for them could be:

Custom rate: are an artificial way to increase the cost of an imported product and make it less competitive versus domestic produced products: to protect domestic industries for a certain time to adjust to new technologies, protect the workers, keep a certain industry alive (imagine there would be no agriculture industry in the US because all food could be bought on the world market and then a war brakes out or a regional conflict or a climatic disaster and the food supply would be interrupted).

Technical requirements: this is a very subtle tool ! E.g. you define technical criteria which can only be full filled by local companies or change them fast enough that nobody can really react.