Archive for the ‘Trade and Immigration’ Category
Russia’s WTO Membership Approved, But Will U.S. Companies Benefit?
At their ongoing ministerial meeting in Geneva, the World Trade Organization’s 153 members earlier today unanimously approved Russia’s accession as a member. The ball is now in the court of the U.S. Congress to effectively ratify this historic development or to forfeit significant benefits for the U.S. economy.
Russia will officially become a member 30 days after its legislative Duma gives its final approval, which is expected to occur in March, April, or May of next year. But U.S. companies will enjoy enhanced access to the Russian market only after Congress votes to repeal application of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment.
The Cold-War-era amendment bars normal trade relations from applying to communist and formerly communist nations that restricted the emigration of Jews. Although that issue disappeared decades ago, the amendment still requires an annual exemption for Russia. As long as the amendment applies, Russia can withhold the more liberal access to its market that it agreed to extend to all other WTO members upon its accession. As Reuters reports today:
The Jackson-Vanik amendment, a 1974 provision linking trade to emigration rights for Soviet Jews, would have to be revoked for Washington to be able to apply so-called “permanent normal trade relations” to Russia.
Failure to do so would allow Russia to deny the United States preferential access to its markets in what would amount to an own-goal for U.S. businesses such as Pepsico or Alcoa that have already invested billions of dollars in Russia.
With Washington and Moscow exchanging reproaches over the conduct of Russia’s parliamentary vote, repealing Jackson-Vanik will be a challenge as Republicans, who control the House, gird for next year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Russia’s membership in the WTO marks an important milestone in its history, but there is hard work yet to be done on the American side,” said Edward Verona, head of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a business lobby that backs Russian WTO entry.
“If Jackson-Vanik still applies to Russia once it accedes, then U.S. companies and farmers will be at a disadvantage to their global competitors and will not have access to the preferential trade regime negotiated over the last 18 years.”
As for our take on why Congress should repeal Jackson-Vanik as soon as possible, you can read the long and the short of it on our website.
WTO Remains a Force for Good
Trade ministers from more than 150 countries are gathering today in Geneva, Switzerland, for a three-day ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. These meetings happen every two years or so. No great breakthroughs are expected at this one, but it does offer an opportunity to take stock of where the WTO and world trade stand a decade after China’s entry into the organization and the launch of the still ongoing Doha Development Round.
News from the first day is a reminder that the organization can still deliver real trade liberalization. Forty-two members, including the United States, announced just a few hours ago that they had revised the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement to open up an estimated $100 billion in annual government purchases to more international competition, potentially saving taxpayers billions of dollars a year.
The revised GPA will also give U.S. companies a fairer shot at winning contracts to supply goods and services to foreign governments. It is a partial antidote to the protectionist trend in the United States and elsewhere to restrict government spending to domestic suppliers in the misguided view that that will stimulate domestic demand.
The Doha Round may be stalled, but global trade has continued to expand. Even with the sharp downturn in trade during the recent Great Recession, in the decade since 2001 global trade volume has increased 44 percent, according to the WTO web site. Trade growth has been especially robust in East Asia and other emerging markets. The anti-market protestors can take some satisfaction in the lack of progress in negotiations, but globalization marches on.
A decade after its entry into the organization, China remains a mixed economy with significant trade barriers, but it has become one of the more open major developing economies. And it is now subject to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism and other disciplines that keep its economy more open than it would be outside the organization. There were dire warnings about a flood of imports from China if we allowed it to join, but in the past decade U.S. exports to China have grown significantly faster than imports from China.
As the chart below shows, since China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001, U.S. exports of goods to China have grown more than five-fold while U.S. imports of Chinese goods have grown four-fold. The robust export growth reflects both the growth of the Chinese economy and the decline of its trade barriers against goods of major export interest to the United States. For that we can give the WTO a major share of the credit.
As I’ve written elsewhere, there are other good reasons to see the WTO as a positive if modest factor in the global economy–to the benefit of the United States and the freedom to trade across the world.
Border Apprehensions Down. Will Our Politicians Notice?
Apprehensions along America’s southwest border have plunged in the past decade. Although there have been plenty of stories about it this week, our politicians have yet to grasp this important fact.
From a peak in 2000, the annual number of arrests along our 2,000 mile border with Mexico has plunged by more than 75 percent. Apprehensions are considered a good although imperfect proxy for attempted border crossings. By any measure, the number of people trying to enter the United States illegally between ports of entry has dropped to its lowest level since comparable records began 40 years ago.
A few implications that are not being talked about enough by politicians of either party:
- For those who demand that we must “get control of our borders first” before discussing real immigration reform, that excuse is more hollow than ever. Net migration from Mexico right now is “essentially zero,” according to Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. This is a political window of opportunity to change our immigration system.
- Immigration reform should be seen as an essential step in reducing illegal traffic across the border. As I’ve noted before, when we have expanded legal immigration in the past, illegal immigration has dropped. The best way to control our border is to expand opportunities for workers from Latin America to enter our country legally through established ports of entry.
- We are in no danger of being flooded by low-skilled immigrants. Yes, beefed up enforcement has played a role in the declining numbers entering illegally, but the economic downturn explains most of the drop off. The Great Recession hit illegal immigrants hard, especially in the construction industry. If the jobs are not available, fewer foreign-born workers come and more go home.
- Conditions in Mexico are improving. Despite bad press about the drug war, staying home has become relatively more attractive for Mexican workers. Thanks to gradual economic reforms, including trade liberalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican economy has enjoyed stable if unspectacular growth. The middle class is growing and poverty is declining. That growth, in turn, has contributed to a plunge in the Mexican birthrate, to where today it has fallen to replacement level.
We should reform our immigration system now. When the U.S. economy recovers to more normal levels of job creation, we will need immigrant workers more than ever. We should be prepared to welcome them legally rather than wasting resources in a futile effort to “control the border” through enforcement only.
Citizens! Do You Know the Source of Your Honey?
Some disturbing news indeed reached my inbox today (HT: David Boaz). Apparently honey is entering the United States under assumed identities. Chinese honey, once ubiquitous, was largely shut out of the American market through anti-dumping measures. So, this article from NPR.org alleges, it started to be sold through a third country (perhaps Indonesia, Thailand, or Malaysia) and was falsely labelled to evade the duties. (Apparently we know this because the honey can be tested for peculiar types of pollen.) The U.S. government wasn’t having any of that of course, and so they held up suspicious shipments through regulations, inspections, and documentary requirements. So now the Chinese honey is allegedly being sold through India.
The domestic honey industry is now starting to worry that all of this nefarious, subversive honey-related activity will suppress the market for all types of honey, including their own, and are starting a fair trade-esque system called True Source Honey, which will trace the honey to a proper, ‘merican source. None of that Chinese muck.
Eric Wenger is president of True Source Honey. Soon, he’s going to Vietnam to help with the first audit of a Vietnamese honey exporter.
“The question we want to answer is: Does that exporter only purchase honey from beekeepers in that country?” he says.
The exporter will give the True Source auditor a list of the beekeepers from whom it buys honey. “Then the auditor will randomly select a number of those beekeepers, go out to that beekeeper’s apiary, and evaluate the capacity of that beekeeper to produce the volume that that exporter claimed was purchased and shipped,” says Wenger.
If everything checks out, that exporter is certified. But even after that, True Source will take samples from every shipment of honey and send those samples to a lab in Germany to see if the pollen matches the flowers that are actually blooming in Vietnam.
True Source wants to expand this system globally. One exporter in India is already certified.
Jill Clark, from Dutch Gold Honey, says these sorts of audited, verified supply chains are getting more common throughout the food business. In some cases, governments are requiring it.
“With all the food safety and food security issues, knowing where your food comes from right now is incredibly important,” she says.
Shouldn’t consumers be the ones to decide that? Removing the anti-dumping duties and discriminatory regulations will reduce the incentive for Chinese honey to be labelled falsely, and then we can decide for ourselves what is “incredibly important.” Or maybe we don’t care, and True Source will be a massive flop.
On a positive note, there are an encouraging number of libertarian comments to the article.
Supreme Court Takes Up Arizona Immigration Law
The Supreme Court has agreed to review Arizona v. United States, the case regarding SB 1070, the Arizona law (only) four sections of which have been enjoined by the lower courts: requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they have lawfully detained whom they have reasonable suspicion to believe may be in the country illegally; making it a state crime to violate federal alien registration laws; making it a state crime for illegal aliens to apply for work, solicit work in a public place, or work as an independent contractor; and permitting warrantless arrests where the police have probable cause to believe that a suspect has committed a crime that makes him subject to deportation. For my previous analysis of SB 1070 and the legal challenges to it, see here, here, here, and here.
By taking up this case, the Supreme Court is wisely nipping in the bud the proliferation of state laws aimed at addressing our broken immigration system. One way or another, states will know how far they can go in addressing issues relating to illegal immigrants, whether the concern is crime, employment opportunities (providing or restricting them), registration requirements, or even so-called sanctuary cities.
Of course, states wouldn’t be getting into this mess if the federal government — elected officials of both parties — hadn’t abdicated its responsibility to fix a system that serves nobody’s interests: not big business or small business, not the rich or the poor, not the most or least educated, not the economy or national security, and certainly not the average taxpayer. For their part, SB 1070 and related laws in Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere are (with small exception) constitutional — the state laws are merely mirroring federal law, not conflicting with it or otherwise intruding on federal authority over immigration — but bad public policy. (For more on both these conclusions, read my SCOTUSblog essay from last summer.)
What this country needs is a comprehensive reform that obviates the sort of ineffectual half-measures the states are left with given Congress’s shameless refusal to act. It’s not very often that Cato calls for the federal government to do something, but the immigration system is quite possibly the most screwed-up part of the federal government — which of itself is a significant statement coming from someone at Cato — and one that is so incredibly counterproductive to American liberty and prosperity.
The Court will hear Arizona v. United States in the spring. For more immigration-reform developments, see this note in today’s Wall Street Journal and my blogpost on Utah’s plan, which the federal government has also since sued to enjoin.
U.S. Export Growth on Track, Thanks to China
The biz media are predictably hailing the small decline in the U.S. trade deficit in October as good news for the economy, but this morning’s monthly trade report from the U.S. Commerce Department is yet one more sign that the U.S. and global economies are struggling.
The media invariably focus on the difference between imports and exports, when the real measure of trade should be the sum of the two—whether total trade is growing or slowing. In October, the trade deficit declined from September only because U.S. imports of goods and services declined even more steeply than exports. How this is good news for the American economy is beyond me.
As I documented in a study earlier this year, imports and the trade deficit typically decline when the U.S. economy is on the ropes. That’s because a drop-off in domestic demand by consumers and businesses typically translates into a drop-off in demand for imported goods and services as well as those produced domestically. Far from boosting the economy, falling imports are one of the surest signs that the economy is down shifting.
U.S. exports also declined in October, in part because of slowing demand abroad. U.S. exports are still on track to double between 2009 and 2014, a goal of President Obama’s National Export Initiative, but the rate of growth year-over-year continues to slow.
China remains a bright spot in U.S. trade, despite the complaints of politicians in Washington. U.S. exports to China continue to grow more rapidly than exports to the rest of the world. Since China joined the World Trade Organization 10 years ago this month, U.S. exports of goods to China have grown five-fold, while they have not quite doubled to the rest of the world.
China is the only major market where U.S. exports have consistently grown above the 15 percent annual rate needed to double every five years. The compound growth rate of U.S. goods exports to China since its entry into the WTO has been 18.1 percent, compared to 6.8 percent to the rest of the world. China is now the third largest foreign market for U.S. goods. Yet a large contingent in Congress wants to slap tariffs on Chinese imports because of its currency practices that supposedly hinder U.S. exports.
In the business world, picking a needless trade fight with one of your best customers would be the height of folly. For many members of Congress, it has become an urgent item on their legislative agenda.
Will Congress Welcome Russia into the WTO?
Next week trade officials representing the more than 150 members of the World Trade Organization will gather in Geneva for a ministerial meeting. Most of the agenda will be a snoozer. The Doha Round is stuck in neutral, with no compromises in sight on agricultural protection, services trade liberalization, or anti-dumping reform. But one item of business will mark a major milestone: the admission of Russia into the club of trading nations.
As I argue in a Washington Times column this morning, and in a Cato Free Trade Bulletin co-authored with Douglas Petersen and released this week, Russia’s entry into the WTO will help to bring more rule of law to the former communist nation. It will also open its market further to U.S. exports, especially civilian aircraft, heavy machinery, computer software and hardware, and beef and poultry.
Approval by WTO members is a near certainty, but what remains an open question is whether the U.S. Congress will grant Russia permanent normal trade relations (PNTR). This will determine whether U.S. companies are granted the more favorable access to Russia’s market offered to other WTO members once it joins the organization. If Congress does not grant PNTR, Russia will join the WTO anyway, but U.S. companies will be at a competitive disadvantage.
In coming weeks, Congress will have an opportunity to welcome one of the world’s largest economies into the rules-based global trading system—and benefit the struggling U.S. economy in the bargain.
Let’s Divest of GM Yesterday
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Charles Lane posits that the time is now for the U.S. Treasury to divest of its remaining 500 million shares of General Motors stock. I agree with that conclusion, but not with Lane’s rationale or his recommendation for a heavy-handed, government-imposed exit strategy.
Just to recap: the Treasury recouped $23 billion of taxpayers’ $50 billion outlay when it sold GM shares to the public in an IPO in November 2010; the outstanding 500 million shares in government coffers must be sold at an average price of $54 to recover the remaining $27 billion; the IPO price was $33; today’s price is $21.69. If all 500 million shares could be sold at today’s price, the Treasury would raise $10.8 billion, leaving taxpayers at a loss of just over $16 billion. (Of course, the sale of such a large number of shares would drive the average selling price way below today’s price, resulting in a much larger taxpayer loss.)
Lane is correct to conclude that GM’s immediate future isn’t looking quite so rosy. Demand is tanking in Europe. Concerns remain about whether GM will continue to be able to fund its $128 billion pension plan. And sales of the “game-changing” Chevy Volt have been lagging since the vehicle’s commercial introduction some 13 months ago—well before its engines demonstrated an annoying propensity to spontaneously combust. (Not to worry, says GM’s public relations team: the engines don’t seem to catch fire while being driven, only an hour or two after they’ve been parked in the garage.) Recognizing that that qualifier hasn’t been reassuring enough, GM is now offering to buy back any Chevy Volt it has ever sold, which doesn’t bode well for the bottom line, but also affirms how few of these Government Motors show pieces have even sold.
That grim analysis is the basis for Lane’s preference for government divestment now. There is more downside risk than upside potential. It is an argument based on market-timing, rather than on the principle that bad things happen when the government has a stake in the outcome of a race that it can influence. Sure, the administration would love to divest of GM at a profit to taxpayers. But the longer it is allowed to wait for that train to arrive, the greater the temptation to grease the skids.
The government should divest now. It should have divested in June, when it was first legally permissible to do so. But the administration (following, by logic, what would have been Lane’s advice at the time) rolled the dice, expecting the stock value to rise. Instead it fell. And then there was this.
But my bigger problem is with Lane’s proposal for a managed divestment. He writes:
It’s time to cut our losses. Treasury should start selling its stake in GM.
And I know just the buyer: GM. The company is sitting on more than $33 billion in cash, about triple the market value of Treasury’s 500 million shares, which is roughly $10.8 billion.
Though GM wants to dedicate much of its cash to shoring up its pension plan, it could still absorb most or all of Treasury’s shares, even if Treasury charges a modest premium over the current market price, as it should.
Lane proposes this under the guise of some perverse fealty to a “free-enterprise economy,” as it would spare shareholders from the stock price-depressing impact of an unnatural 500 million share dump. But those shareholders knew the risks they were taking when they purchased GM stock in the first place. They certainly knew that the largest single shareholder didn’t intend to hold its position for very long. Lane’s argument for protecting those shareholders in the name of free-enterprise in unconvincing, if not misplaced.
Furthermore, Lane’s zeal for sticking it to GM seems to eclipse any real commitment to free markets. Forcing GM to divert resources from where management wants to commit them in order to achieve some favorable political outcome (a smaller taxpayer loss) is just as coercive as some of the administration’s actions on the road to GM’s nationalization in the first place.
GM should not be entitled to any favors or exceptional treatment by virtue of its ownership structure. To be certain of that, it should be 100 privatized yesterday. But likewise, GM should not be subject to compensatory or otherwise countervailing policies designed to punish or remove any perceived advantage. For starters, it is impossible to measure the benefits received or the penalties suffered with any precision. Demanding that GM not be exposed to special treatment goes in both directions.
Pining for the Next War at the Washington Post?
If nothing else, the Washington Post is fairly consistent in its use of over-the-top headlines that promise so much more than the stories deliver. I’ve commented on this excessive reliance on hyperbole before, but today’s web page headline (at around 2:00 pm) — U.S.to Counter China with Troops in Australia* — warrants a few words.
The thrust of the story is that the U.S. military will establish a “permanent” presence of 250 troops in Darwin, Australia. Is reaffirmation of a U.S. commitment in the Pacific intended to send some kind of signal to China? Yes. But to counter what? China’s alleged expansionary designs? With 250 troops?
Sure, the Chinese government has asserted disputable and disputed territorial claims throughout the South China Sea and sure the Aussies and Filipinos and Indonesians and Vietnamese would love to devote their resources to economic growth while U.S. taxpayers pick up their security costs, but the headline gives the impression of imminent conflagration.
I am growing more confident that any confrontation between the United States and China — should that occur in the years ahead — is more likely to be the product of provocative media sensationalism intended to arouse U.S. nationalism than any real belligerence on the part of China.
* As of 2:25, the headline has been softened somewhat to “U.S. Troops Headed to Australia, Irking China.”
Ex-Im Bank Pits U.S. Industry Against Industry
I know it’s unseemly to brag, but I just couldn’t help but feel vindicated when I read this article in the Wall Street Journal today about recent complaints by the Air Transport Association to the Export-Import Bank of the United States regarding their loan guarantees to foreign airliners.
On page 15 of my recent Trade Policy Analysis, “Time to X Out the Ex-Im Bank“, I warn: “…the billions of dollars the bank authorizes each year in financing to foreign airlines to buy American aircraft could be seen as a way of helping foreign airlines compete against American ones.”
Behold, buried on page B4:
In a letter to Ex-Im Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg earlier this month, the Air Transport Association, a trade group for America’s biggest carriers, called on the federal agency to slash subsidies to all overseas buyers of Boeing jets.
“The bank’s support for foreign airlines injures U.S. carriers,” said ATA outside counsel Michael K. Kellogg…
</smug>
U.S. Still ‘On Track’ to Double Exports by 2014
In his State of the Union address in January 2010, President Obama launched his National Export Initiative with the explicit goal of doubling U.S. exports by 2014. The Commerce Department’s monthly trade report released this morning confirms that U.S. exporters remain “on track” to meet that goal—to my pleasant surprise. (See the chart below.)
I went on record earlier this year with skepticism that the goal was realistic. And to my defense, we are still less than two years into the journey. Doubling exports in five years requires an annual growth rate of almost 15 percent, about double the average rate of export growth during the past 30 years. The current annualized growth of 16.3 percent since 2009 will be increasingly difficult to sustain as the rebound from the previous global recession wears off and storm clouds gather over the Eurozone.
We’ve long argued at the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies that exports are only part of the trade equation. American producers and consumers benefit from competitively priced imports as well as foreign investment in the United States. But the NEI has served a useful political function of providing a framework for the administration to pursue trade liberalization.
In the name of promoting exports, the Obama administration managed to work with Republicans in Congress last month to pass trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. It has also resolved the cross-border trucking dispute with Mexico satisfactorily enough to remove Mexican sanctions against another $2.4 billion in U.S. exports. And it will soon be working with Congress to establish permanent normal trade relations with Russia, ushering the world’s 11th largest economy into the World Trade Organization and opening its market further to U.S. exports.
Even if U.S. exports fall short of doubling by 2014, expanding our freedom to trade is always a goal worth pursuing.
Farm Subsidies and ‘Risk Management’
There has been much written recently about the so-called shallow loss proposals to provide subsidies for farms in cases when farm revenues fall slightly below the record high levels of the past few years. The proposals come from a bi-partisan collection of influential farm state legislators, such as Rep. Collin Peterson (D., MN) and Senator Richard Lugar (R, IN) et al., and commodity groups such as the National Cotton Council. (The Congressional Research Service has prepared a helpful summary of the proposals). All suggest that new and expanded subsidy programs are needed to help farmers manage untoward risks of farming. These ideas have even gotten support from some long time advocates for farm policy reform such as the distinguished former Agriculture Secretary and U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter.
Let us take a step back and put these proposed programs in context. First, since the middle of the last decade farm prices for the major grains, oil seeds and cotton have doubled or more than doubled and are expected to remain elevated. This has meant that the long-standing support programs with their fixed congressionally mandated support prices no longer trigger payments. Projections for the next decade suggest that prices are unlikely to drop back to below the established support prices. Since there is no support for simply raising the government set minimum prices, and simply paying farmers and farmland owners based on their history of having political clout (as was established in 1996) now seems infeasible, commodity groups needed another formulation to continue to receive significant government payments.
One way to ratchet up supports and lock in high revenues is to tie payments not to price per se, but to revenue. Hence the new proposals each include variants of the idea that when revenue declines by 5 or ten percent below what farmers of a particular commodity have come to expect, the taxpayer would make payments to fill the gap. Thus, this year, with harvest time price of soybeans about 10 percent below the futures price established last winter, government payments would kick in under some proposals. Even now under subsidized crop insurance programs, farms or county yields as little as 5 percent below average would be enough to trigger crop insurance payments in some cases. Notice this would happen with a price of soybeans of more than $12 per bushel when the average farm price from 2004 to 2006 (not a particularly low-price period) was below $6.00 per bushel. In other words, historically high prices have become the new “benchmark” for support. Talk about a ratchet effect.
We can use insurance information to get a sense of how much the proposed programs are designed to satisfy farmers latent demand for “risk management.” Under the current crop insurance program with more than 50% premium subsidies, additional subsidies for program delivery, and subsidies to cover losses of insurance companies, relatively few farmers buy insurance to cover losses above 20 percent. And, as premium subsidies decline farmers abandon insurance altogether. Farmers employ many risk management strategies from diversification and crop rotation to storage and use of forward contracts. Given these options, they do not choose to buy more risk management when asked to pay a major share of the costs. The opportunity to lock in high revenues with expected payoffs likely to be in the billions of dollars is not about risk but about higher returns, and no operation can afford to turn down higher returns with little or no risk.
Finally, there are two further problems with the argument that farming is especially risky and therefore taxpayers must continue to provide payments whenever revenue targets are not met.
First, notice that this idea only seems to apply to that subset of farm commodities that have received the traditional farm subsidies since the 1930s. There are no proposals for massive “shallow loss” subsidies for industries such as fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, broilers, hay, hogs, beef cattle, greenhouse and nursery products, eggs or seeds. These industries are at least as risky as corn and soybeans, but they have not traditionally been subsidized to the degree to which some crops have become accustomed. (As an aside, there is no evidence that the long term prosperity or productivity of the heavily subsidized industries is higher than the less subsidized farm commodity industries.)
Second, the debt to equity ratio of the subsidized farm sectors does not make them particularly vulnerable. In fact farm debt is well below 15 percent of equity. Moreover, most farms have substantial non-farm income and most farmers work off the farm or get retirement income from non-farm occupations. The farmers that are least likely to work off the farm operate the largest farms and practice a number of risk management strategies. Thus, relatively few farms are in danger going under. Farming is a risky business, but, given how they are organized, there is nothing particularly risky about farming compared to other businesses.
Under the new “risk management” proposals, any individual farm would gain from access to government payments when market revenue falls below some recent average or pre-set target. That said, there is simply no evidence or consistent reasoning for subsidies whether rationalized by “risk management” or one of the other dozen or so common claims (see page 12 of this book by Stanford University’s Woods Institute). Furthermore, there is no evidence that the long term prosperity of agriculture is enhanced by government subsidies or that U.S. farming is more productive or that Americans eat better because we have spent trillions of dollars on farm subsidies over the past seven decades. The best argument for farm subsidies is that we have always had them and change is hard. But, that argument has been stretched a bit thin and this period of record farm profits and record government budget deficits is an ideal time to finally cut the cord.
(Other papers critical of recent “risk management” proposals and well worth your time are a piece written by Bruce Babcock for the Environmental Working Group and one by Barry Goodwin and Vince Smith for AEI. For a recent broader evaluation of farm subsidies visit my paper written jointly with Barry and Vince and published by AEI).
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