Lubbock - Rich on Subsidies

Its citizens like to think of themselves as self-reliant straight talkers. It seems strange, then, to think of this region as a sprawling welfare case.

But the cotton farms that give Lubbock much of its identity thrive from huge government subsidies that drain the federal treasury and shelter the industry from the discipline of the market. The rest of the world rightfully regards those subsidies as unfair to poor countries, whose cotton farmers cannot compete against the below-cost prices at which American cotton sells.

Dumped abroad at below cost, our cotton depresses prices and hurts farmers in poor nations like Mali or Burkina Faso. At the recent World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, where attempts to reform the agricultural trade rules ended in failure, widespread outrage against American cotton subsidies dominated the headlines.

The "cotton-picking truth," as they might say in rural Texas, is that the United States has no business growing 16 million bales of cotton a year. Continuing to deny this reality is patently unfair. If the United States eliminated the subsidies, the world prices for cotton would rise, helping farmers overseas but having minimal effect on consumers (there is only about a dollar's worth of cotton in a pair of jeans). It would save the American taxpayers billions of dollars, and it would allow Americans to strike a very visible blow for fairness between rich countries and poor.