| Here's the story. The U.S. subsidizes cotton, giving farmers an incentive to overproduce. As a result, cheap U.S. cotton depresses the world price of cotton, making it hard for farmers overseas to compete. (Cotton, by the way, is a ridiculously nasty crop the way we grow it. I've put details on this at the bottom of this post. Given the amount of chemicals that go into growing cotton in the U.S., I'd rather NOT have policy promoting overproduction of it.)
Some years ago, Brazil complained about U.S. cotton subsidies to the WTO. In 2005, the WTO sided with them. The U.S. did nothing. The WTO gave Brazil the right to impose tariffs on U.S. goods and to violate many U.S. patents:
So last August, the WTO gave Brazil the right to impose punitive tariffs and lift patent protections on $829 million worth of U.S. goods - including nonfarm products like cars, drugs, textiles, chemicals, electronics, movies and music.
That would have started on April 7 of this year. But at the last minute, the U.S. negotiated a deal:
Time says:
The obvious solution, in an alternate universe, would have been for the U.S. to get rid of its improper subsidies.
I disagree. I think the obvious solution is to drop out of the WTO and then reform our subsidies so they do the job we need them to do. That is, the U.S. should have a supply management system and price supports, maintaining a floor price and storing excess cotton when production exceeds demand. That way, instead of taxpayers paying the difference between the cost of cotton production and the artificially low price, buyers of cotton (corporations, agribusiness) would pay a fair price to farmers. Obviously, corporations and agribusiness HATE this idea. The up-side for them, though, is that it smooths out high prices for commodities as well because when demand exceeds supply, the government would release more cotton onto the market to meet the demand. But, let's move on.
Time continues:
But the current farm bill does not expire until 2012, and the congressional agriculture committees don't want to mess with it because, well, they just don't. Senate Agriculture Chairman Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and ranking Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia on Wednesday praised both governments for finding an alternative solution and pledged to "explore modifications" in 2012. Maybe they will, but don't bet on it - cotton, after all, is not unheard of in Arkansas and Georgia.
Umm, yeah. Arkansas is the #2 cotton producing state in the U.S. (behind Texas). This is one more reason why Blanche needs to go.
So what did we do instead of dropping out of the WTO and reforming subsidies?
The U.S. negotiators did agree to modify the complicated export-guarantee program to make it less of an export-subsidy program. They also agreed to ease restrictions on Brazilian beef that have been justified as an effort to protect Americans from foot-and-mouth disease - and criticized as an effort to protect U.S. cattlemen from competition. But the big-ticket item is the settlement's "technical assistance" fund of $147.3 million, prorated, for Brazilian cotton growers. That just happens to be the precise amount of the retaliation the WTO had approved for the improper cotton subsidies. According to the U.S. press release, the fund will be replenished every year "until passage of the next farm bill or a mutually agreed solution to the cotton dispute is reached." So the total cost will exceed the price tag of the infamous Alaskan bridge to nowhere, which was at least designed for Alaskans; the annual cost will far exceed the $100 million President Obama ordered his Cabinet to cut from the federal budget last year.
Children of America, $147.3 million is the amount that agribusiness and free trade ideologues just stole from the amount of money available to improve your lunches. Sorry if you get diabetes.
Why Cotton is So Filthy: In the past I've read statistics that 25% of all insecticides are used on cotton. I don't know if that is still true because most cotton in the U.S. is genetically modified to produce Bt - an organic pesticide - in every cell of the plant. (It may be acceptable to use in organics but that doesn't make having your plant coated in it 24/7 is a good thing.) Presumably, Bt cotton allows farmers to no longer spray pesticides on the plants but just because they aren't spraying doesn't mean they aren't using any pesticides. After all, the plants themselves are producing lots of Bt. When Bt is sprayed on it breaks down quickly in the environment, but when the plants produce it in every cell, it's always present. Cotton is also engineered to be "Roundup Ready," which means farmers douse their fields in Monsanto's herbicide Roundup. Because there are now Roundup-resistant weeds, they likely spray other herbicides too. |
