NEVER mind Venus and Mars. When it comes to perceptions of the impact of farm policy in the United States, most of the world is from Pluto and Americans are from Uranus.
A Canadian listening to a news conference last week as American farm leaders and the farm aid lobby, led by country singer Willie Nelson, denounced American farm policy as farmer destroying, was struck by the gap between what was being said and how most of the world views it.
“Washington politicians have passed farm bills, one after the other, that have forced tens of thousands of family farmers off their land in recent years,” Nelson said.
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South Carolina farmer Leon Crump lamented the U.S. farm policy bias toward big and corporate farming and the low price-high cost squeeze those policies have imposed on farmers.
These are folks, equivalent to the National Farmers Union and including the American National Farmers Union, that decry corporate power in food markets and the bias of policy toward it.
Yet it is the argument that American farmers receive little but grief from successive farm bills that is jarring.
Among the close to 150 nations meeting in Cancœn, Mexico this week for World Trade Organization talks, there likely are few whose farmers don’t envy the $19 billion US in subsidies authorized by the latest farm bill and imagine American farmers high-fiving each other as they walk to mailboxes that are groaning with cash from Washington.
That obviously is not what the American farm lobby left wing believes is happening. They advocate more farm co-operative market power and a form of supply management instead of more free trade.
But talk to the other side, the conservative and free trade-supporting wing of the American farm lobby represented by the American Farm Bureau and some cattle groups and you get a different story.
As they see it, free trade has not worked only because the rest of the world has not played the game as well as the Americans.
Again, it is a jarring perspective for a Canadian to hear Americans’ complaint that their country is a trade boy scout, being taken advantage of by others.
It is reflected in the Farm Bureau position that it will agree to domestic subsidy reductions only if developing countries will stop being so protectionist and let American product in.
Many countries, Canada often included, see the Americans a different way – rhetorical free traders who insist other countries drop protection while getting their protectionist knickers in a knot when imports take domestic market share from them.
It may be that some of these American self-perceptions about the flaws of their own policies or others are correct.
It is equally true that most other countries don’t believe them. That gap is one of the deep problems underpinning attempts to negotiate more sensible world agricultural trade rules.
The U.S. is seen as having built subsidized and protectionist Fortress America and now wants to create WTO rules that work in its favour. Others push back.
At the very least, the Americans should be doing a better job of credibly explaining arguments and experience.
The nation that invented Madison Avenue sales pitches does a poor job of making its case.
