Producer Fossil Fuel Subsidies

United States farm subsidy programs are again proving to be a major obstacle to expanding international trade opportunities at Geneva meetings aimed at reviving the Doha round of trade negotiations. Opponents of farm subsidy reform may be applauding this impasse, but there is be no reason for glee from the public at large. U.S. farm subsidy programs are broken and need to be fixed.

Jaideep Hardikar, an Indian journalist with Daily News and Analysis (DNA), spends much of his time in rural Vidarbha, in the state of Maharashtra, where it is estimated that on average a farmer commits suicide every eight hours. It his job to document this disturbing symptom of what has become widely known as India's "agrarian crisis", but also to uncover the underlying root causes.

With the progressive dismantling of formal trade barriers as a result of many rounds of global trade negotiations, subsidies have become increasingly important as a way for governments to regulate economic activity within their territories.

In a recent article ("A New Agenda for Global Warming"), Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, suggests that Japan, Europe, and the other signatories of Kyoto should immediately bring a WTO subsidy case against the United States for not ratifying the Kyoto Convention and for not taxing adequately CO2 emissions by US firms.

People invariably ask, given we have only recently started in this business, why did we choose to work on biofuels? In deciding research priorities we have several criteria. One is that we would not try to duplicate the work of others. Another is that when we look into subsidies to a particular sector, the sector should be one that is subsidized by many countries.

The recent surge in international energy prices has placed energy subsidies at the forefront of the economic policy agenda in many countries, particularly where government interventions are intended to keep prices low to households and industry, or to protect indigenous energy industries from foreign competition.

The last round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks, the Uruguay Round, broke new ground by broadening the scope of world trade rules to cover areas never before subject to multilateral disciplines, and the services sector was without doubt where such broadening was most significant in economic terms.