They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s certainly no such thing as a free-trade agreement that survives Congress without breaking a sweat. At least not these days.
Few people appreciate the importance of genetic change as well as farmers. After all, we’ve been cross-breeding to build better plants for eons--going all the way back to prehistoric communities thousands of years ago. The crops we grow today aren’t anything like the ones our ancestors found in the wild and decided to cultivate. And that’s true even without recent advances in biotechnology.
On July 17th Crawford Falconer, Chairman of the Committee on Agriculture of the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations, released a draft of possible modalities for agriculture. The Chairman of the Committee on Non Agriculture Market Access (NAMA) also released a draft text of his committee’s work. The U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) office noted in a statement that, “the Chairs’ issuance of draft texts at this stage is a single step in a longer term process” to establish the detailed negotiating framework for the final stage of the talks.
Press reports that Japan is interested in a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States in response to the U.S.-Korea FTA have again raised concerns about the effectiveness of bilateral agreements in moving toward freer world trade. As the Doha Round of WTO trade policy negotiations continues to drag on, discussions about FTAs have become even more important. The issue is not whether bilateral or multilateral agreements are better, but how they can work together in a world that needs continued efforts to remove trade barriers.
The Economic Research Service (ERS) of USDA provides estimates of U.S. agricultural exports by state. They do not track actual shipments from the state of production to export markets; for most products export allocations are based on state production estimates. ERS also uses Customs district export data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. The estimates provide a picture of the wide range of U.S. agricultural exports.
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They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s certainly no such thing as a free-trade agreement that survives Congress without breaking a sweat. At least not these days.
Few people appreciate the importance of genetic change as well as farmers. After all, we’ve been cross-breeding to build better plants for eons--going all the way back to prehistoric communities thousands of years ago. The crops we grow today aren’t anything like the ones our ancestors found in the wild and decided to cultivate. And that’s true even without recent advances in biotechnology.
