Down with farm subsidies!

Our handsome and well-dressed president deserves credit for trying to get rid of our ridiculous farm subsidies: check out the NY Times article here.

I was just having a conversation with a Peruvian guy here who is something of a dependencista--believes that the rich countries are extracting the wealth of Peru and not permitting Peru to develop, so that we can stay rich ourselves. He's pretty deterministic about it, and I don't agree, of course, with the deterministic type of dependency theory. However, you can see his point, to a degree.

One good example of this is US agricultural policy. The US wants "free trade," but free trade would consist of Peruvian agricultural producers competing with heavily subsidized US agricultural products--corn, wheat, and rice. The Peruvian government, of course, can't afford to subsidize Peruvian agriculture the way we can in teh US, so they get the short end of the stick--and maybe a lot of people get driven out of business and into (even worse) poverty.

"Free" trade? "Fair" trade?

Of course, it puts another twist on the complaints a lot of US citizens have about NAFTA--the Mexicans have a lot of the same complaints. That isn't to say that I'm opposed to free trade--but if it's going to be free, it really needs to be free.

And by the way, it should be accompanied by deeper political institutions that ensure nobody gains an advantage by exploiting child labor, slave labor, or other forms of exploitation.