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The National Interest
Agri-vation: The Farm Bill from Hell
by C. Ford Runge
. . . To the EU, U.S. actions say that, despite a carefully constructed U.S. negotiating strategy during the Uruguay Round that paired reduced levels of domestic support through lower loan rates and planting flexibility with pressure on the eu to move in a similar direction, all bets are now off. In effect, we have rewarded those in the EU (notably the French, of all people...) who have steadfastly resisted internal reforms of the bloated Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). We have also convinced many in the eu that this is yet another form of U.S. unilateralism in which no account is taken of the negative impacts of U.S. policy on the rest of the world. The French historically termed the English "perfidious Albion." Perfidious America is now an easy charge, helping the eu justify a continuation of its own wildly excessive export subsidies. To the developing countries, there is a double message. The first is stark. For families in Africa, Asia and Latin America struggling to survive on a dollar or two a day, the insulation offered from market competition to U.S. producers may be literally lethal to them. Returning again to the example of cotton, U.S. overproduction, driven by expanded subsidies, has driven global cotton prices into the sub-basement. In Mali, one of the poorest African states, cotton prices have declined 10 percent in the last year alone. Mali is a Muslim country where, despite U.S. foreign aid spending of $40 million on education and health, the decline in cotton prices has imposed a $30 million deficit on the state cotton company, effectively wiping out three-quarters of the value of U.S. aid. What the United States gives to rich cotton farmers in the Mississippi Delta thus takes away from the poor in a country like Mali. To these disaffected Muslim farmers, the words of a farm union leader ring true: "The Americans know that with their subsidies they are killing so many economies in the developing world.". . . .