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THE CITY NEW AGE TRADING POST

If Dallas wants to be an international marketplace, we’ll have to outgrow some small-town problems.
By BETH HUDDLESTON |

Take a globe of the world and put a piece of string on it; start the string in Tokyo and wind up in Rio de Janeiro. You’ll find that Dallas/Fort Worth is almost in a straight line between these major trading destinations.”

The speaker is Bill Cooper, past chairman of the Market Center and one of the community’s most fervent internationalists. He uses this simple demonstration to point out the prime location of the Dallas area, a location that should help Dallas become a leading player on the international trade scene, The potential is there. Cooper believes.

Bui “potential;’ as the old saying goes, means you haven’t done it yet. And if you define an international city as one that is a recognized crossroads that attracts people from all over the world for trade and cultural interchange, then Dallas still has a long way to go. Our efforts are weakened by factions and fragmentation, duplication of efforts, and lack of public awareness.

A look at the sheer numbers of “international” organizations trying to make a go of it in Dallas should indicate the size of the problem: The International Society, The International Center, the United Nations Association, The World Cultural Alliance, the International Business Forum of the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and the Metroplex International Development Association (MIDAS for short). And don’t forget the more than twenty-four separate economic development organizations in the area, most of them sporting their own international development arms.

When Mayor Strauss created the Mayor’s Commission on International Development in the fall of 1987, it was an attempt by the city’s head wrangler to lasso and harness the unruly horses of internationalism. Almost two hundred members and seven task forces [traduced a seventeen-page final report inderscoring the need for a united effort. The report contained numerous valuable recommendations, but two stand out. One will require us to open our wallets and support an International Trade Resource Center. The other will require us to open our hearts and build a more catholic, culturally diverse Dallas.

When the two intercontinental railroad lines crossed just a mile from Dallas’s water supply in 1873, the town rose out of obscurity. No longer were we just another trading post out on the prairie. In 1974, the Metroplex became a national hub with the opening of D/FW airport. Now, if all goes as planned. 1989 may be remembered as the year that Dallas became a prototype for the “New Age trading post” that sees the whole world as its market.

As an outgrowth of the Mayor’s Commission on International Development, all key players have agreed to establish two International Trade Resource Centers that will service the entire area. The first will open at the World Trade Center in Dallas in the early summer; soon afterwards, another will be started in Fort Worth.

The centers will offer more than another use of the term “international.” They will be patterned after the best World Trade Centers around the world, with a clearly defined if sweeping mission: to offer complete assistance to any interested business on matters of trade leads, freight forwarding, travel arrangements, translating services, counseling, financing, and more. According to Cannon Stiles, director of the Southwest International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, “one of the main priorities of the center is to truly be a one-stop shop for the public.” Stiles is enthusiastic about the unusual degree of cooperation shown by the various international interests, but he remains cautious. “Turf battles between the different organizations are my absolute greatest fear,” he says.

Gary Woods, chairman of the Medical Task Force of the Mayor’s Commission, shares Stiles’s fears. Woods believes that our regional heritage of rugged individualism has hampered cooperation. “A team approach is countercultural and different from the mentality that made the Southwest, but we have to start pulling together or it is meaningless,” says Woods.

Given our current problems in real estate, oil. and gas, it’s obvious that entrepreneurs are looking around for new forms of business, and exporting is receiving a lot of attention. But surprisingly, Dallas ranked last in the category of foreign trade when compared with eight other cities in the commission’s report. As internationalist guru James A. Crupi says, “Any company that’s not international in ten years won’t be in business.”

For any modest-sized business wanting to enter the export arena, the greatest problem is financing. Most regional banks-particularly those without international departments-feel uncomfortable with financing international trade transactions, and the major banks have enough domestic problems to keep them busy without taking a risk on an overseas venture. Robert Rendell, an attorney with Johnson & Swanson, has been working on bringing a pilot program of the Export/Import Bank of the United States to Dallas. Rendell says that Dallas is one of the finalists, but adds that the bank is having severe budgetary problems and says the future of the entire program is uncertain. But the International Trade Resource Center will have an export finance office, Rendell vows.

The other “international” goal-increased appreciation for diverse cultures-may cost less in money but more in time and education. One of the most disturbing sections of the Mayor’s Commission report was a study that compared the attitudes and perceptions of foreign nationals living in Atlanta to those in Dallas. Numerous areas were explored, ranging from cultural amenities or climate to discrimination and ethnic issues. Dallas ranked higher in only two areas: a central geographic location and convenient airport. A majority of those surveyed did not “feel at home” in Dallas and did not plan to stay permanently.

Even locating the so-called “interna-tional1’ sector of the city is difficult, many report. In coastal cities, the port district is usually the locus of foreign trade and interchange. In Dallas, it’s the World Trade Center, or maybe the airport. Karen White-ley, former owner of International Language Services, says that she bought her company in 1986 because she believed the self-puffery about Dallas’s increased cosmopolitanism. She became a member of all the international groups and attended all of the meetings-only to find that most of the corporate translation accounts and foreign language training demand came from other cities.

The world’s great international cities- London, Paris, Zurich, Hong Kong-did not get that way overnight. Trade networks and world stature do not come merely because a city wants them; they come because of solid planning, strong leadership, unified effort, and citizens willing to reach out to other cultures and try new ways of doing business. Like fine wines, truly international cities have to be aged properly, with care and pa tience. Time will tell whether 1989 was a vintage year for Dallas.

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