Made in' labels are a big reason for today's trade war

As Apple's iPhone shows, single-country origin labels are deceptive and tend to feed xenophobia

- SANJOY CHAKRAVORTY

Where is a Toyota Camry or iPhone made? There is a label that identifies the country in which the final product assembly takes place, but it says nothing about where the product is actually ‘made.’ It is unable to do so because for goods that have inputs (material or intellectual) that are traded across international borders, the answer is never a single country.

It is estimated that a car has some 30,000 parts (counting everything from its engine block to nuts and bolts). The firm that provides a car’s marque (like Dodge or Toyota) manufactures only a fraction of these parts in plants spread around the world. Several intermediate parts like tires, windshields, seats and mirrors, plus hundreds of smaller items, including electronics, are made by suppliers—many with names that people have never heard of—that themselves are scattered around the world.

A 2009 documentary called Global Car dissects the production of a single small item: the radiator cap for the Dodge Ram truck. It is designed in the UK, its metal components are mined and cast in Germany, sent for machining to the UK, thenceforth to Chennai to add plastic components, onward to Tennessee for placement in the engine, which is then sent to Mexico for final assembly. The finished car is sent back to the US for sale. Can we really identify where the radiator cap was ‘made’? How can we possibly say where the car itself was ‘made’?