The Cotton Wars
NPR's Planet Money has posted a great new audible podcast and blog entry on The Cotton Wars about US subsidies to Cotton farmers. It's a journalistic investigation and a great introduction to the political economy of the issues and how trade agreements and WTO enforcement (or lack thereof) occurs in practice. The narrative follows the history behind a number of recent successful complaints that Brazil (a major cotton producer in their own right) has filed against and appeals to the World Trade Organization claiming that the United States is violating it's own previous trade treaty commitments because of the ways it implements these subsidies. Colorful characters on both sides of the debate are interviewed. We will spend a considerable amount of time looking at the topic of Agricultural Export Subsidies, which is one of the main topics in Chapter 10 of the textbook. International organizations such as Oxfam claim that US cotton subsidies do mo...