What you can do to alleviate poverty

Here is an article from the NY Times about the recent WTO ruling about cotton subsidies. Since linking to the NYT is always spotty, here's a big fair-use chunk of it. Or here is an article from the Economist. Or, for the especially lazy among you, here's a summary:

The WTO's goal is `free trade', meaning the removal of restrictions on the market that prevent the free flow of goods. This usually means tariffs or blockades at the borders. This also includes anti-dumping rules, which make it illegal for a government to pay one of its exporters to send goods overseas, because this would also prevent the market from arriving at the natural price for the goods, at the cost of the industries of the importing country which don't have their own subsidies propping them up.

So what about when a country subsidizes an industry not for the sake of exports, but just hands them lots of money all the time? This too will have a distortionary effect on the world market, and although it is not a trade barrier blocking a free market, it makes it impossible for producers in other countries to compete, preventing a fair market.

Hard question; there was a decade-long agreement in the WTO to just not talk about it. That agreement expired on 1 January of this year, and Brazil immediately litigated the issue, suing the U.S.A. for cotton subsidies and the EU for sugar subsidies (see this Economist article on sugar). Brazil won with the U.S.A. (EU is pending), and the official ruling of the WTO is that the cotton subsidies must stop: they hurt farmers in poor countries all around the world. Our government, for its part, will fight this as far as possible. At the extreme, the U.S.A. may even drop out of the WTO entirely---and when it does so, it will point to the liberal agitators who wanted a better deal for the world's poor and say that it is doing the agitators a favor.

Doing something We'll divide Americans into two classes: people who have no idea about cotton subsidies and their effects on world poverty, and cotton farmers. The cotton farmers are out in full force, hoping to ensure that the U.S.A. defies the WTO and keeps the subsidies coming. The rest of us, who don't grow cotton and think poverty sucks, need to do our part to counter them.

That's right, it's time to write your congressperson. Forget switching to the hippie phone company or picketing the World Bank: this is the easiest, and potentially most effective thing you can do to help alleviate world poverty today.

A few tips: handwritten letters get much more consideration than printed letters, which get much more consideration than emails, and emails that show distinctness get much more consideration than those with signs of cut-and-pasting. But in the mean time, here are some sample letters, which I hope you will, at the least, cut and paste to your congressman.

If your congressperson is a liberal
I am writing you with regards to the recent WTO ruling that the U.S. must curb its cotton subsidies. I believe that we should make every effort to comply with this ruling.

Personally, I am worried that we do not do enough to help the poor nations of the world. By cutting cotton subsidies, we do just that---and save billions of dollars in the process. The World Bank found that if the wealthier nations cut their agricultural subsidies, then 144 million people could be lifted out of poverty. Cutting the budget and helping the poor at the same time is a win-win situation if ever there was one.

The U.S.A. has lost face in the world since the invasion of Iraq, and needs to improve its image. This is a wonderful (and cheap) way to do so, showing that we have an interest in the world that goes beyond its oil, and that we have respect for international organizations even when they don't entirely agree with us.

The alternative, maintaining subsidies in the face of a WTO ruling that we should not, would leave parts of the world poorer and make them hate the U.S.A. still more. I would not feel more secure in a world like that.

So please, curb the cotton subsidies, as the WTO has mandated that you do. Doing so would help the U.S.A. and the impoverished of the world in equal measure.

If your congressperson is a conservative
I am writing you with regards to the recent WTO ruling that the U.S. must curb its cotton subsidies. I believe that we should make every effort to comply with this ruling.

Our budget deficit is larger than ever, and I know you are looking for more waste to trim. Now you have a international ruling that you must cut billions of dollars in handouts from our budget---what more could you ask?

I know that special interests are coming to you telling you that every cotton farmer in America will go out of business if these subsidies are eliminated, but I don't believe them, and I don't think you should either. Our farmers are still the best-educated, best-equipped farmers in the world, working on some of the best soil in the world. They will compete and prosper in a free market.

I am not asking you to hurt cotton farmers. I am asking you to return them to the same position that the rest of us are in: earning our money by good work instead of good lobbying. In the long run, this will benefit us all, as fiscal sanity and bravery in the face of special interests always will.