aCentre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi-110016
bDepartment of Economics, St. Xaviers College, Mumbai
Online published on 5 December, 2018.
This study critically analyses the US cotton policy and its implications for the developing countries. It also covers various proposals tabled at WTO regarding subsidies being provided to cotton by the developed nations and examines the effect of these proposals on trade by the U.S. and India. The result shows that US has been distorting international trade in cotton through its subsidy programs, affecting GDP's and livelihood of small and marginal farmers of the developing and least developed countries. Not only this, U.S. has further policy space to expand its level of Domestic Support to agriculture and thereby to cotton under the modalities of Agreement on Agriculture of WTO. However, U.S. is not engaged in any concrete WTO negotiation on cotton and there was no consensus on cotton support in the WTO Ministerial Conference at Buenos Aires held in Argentina in 2017.
