CSM column Thursday
I have a column in Thursday's CSM. It's titled Time to end US cotton subsidies, and it celebrates the recent WTO ruling in favor of Brazil and against the US on the issue of the illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers.
This is an issue I've been following for quite a while. If the US ends these subsidies, then hundreds of thousands of cotton farmers in low-income places around the world can start to raise their crops again, in the knowledge that the prices they can get will no longer be artifcially depressed by the $4.8 billiob a year the US taxpayers have been forced to pay to a relative handful of American farmers, many of them by no means poorly off.
Good for President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who brought the case!
And now, let's look at all the other national-producer subsidies and the many other ways in which the terms of trade in the global market are stacked against people in low-income countries...