Are Cotton Subsidy Cuts in the President's Budget?

By John Ballard

I'm not a policy wonk and ask the question simply because I don't know. It makes little difference since the final budget will result from political quid pro quo negotiations between special interests and  their bought & paid for   elected representatives. In the case of cotton subsidies Egyptian farmers don't have a dog in this fight so the odds of their getting any consideration are pretty small.** I bring this up after reading this part of a longer reflective post by Helena Cobban.

Many of my Egyptian friends are saying that if westerners really want to support Egypt's democracy, the best thing we can do is go and take vacations there. Well, I guess I can support that (and yes, I am really eager to come back!)

But I think maybe the very best thing we can do is to stop using our taxpayer dollars to provide completely illegal subsidies to the U.S. Big Cotton cartel. Here are some resources I quickly gathered on this issue: 1,  2,  3. The last one notes that,

According to the Environmental Working Group, American cotton growers are among the largest recipients of U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies. They receive a total of more than $3 billion a year in payments each year.

And the vast majority of that money goes to just 2,000 Big Cotton companies, not to family farmers...

The first source I link to (the FT, from summer 2009), has this:

In Egypt, the area to be cultivated with cotton this season has shrunk by 10 per cent to 300,000 acres, its lowest ever, says Mefreh El Beltagui, a cotton exporter and an official of Alcotexa, the Alexandria-based association of cotton exporters.

�If the US were to remove its cotton subsidy, they would not be able to compete with us,� he says. �Here there are no subsidies for cotton exports. The state needs to intervene, because here we have mostly small farmers who cannot deal with price fluctuations. Also because we need to preserve our [international] customers for Egyptian cotton. Once you lose a customer it is hard to get them back.�

Of course, the other thing we need to do to help the Egyptian democrats is scale back our aid to the Egyptian military considerably, and divert it instead to an Egyptan-controlled fund to support the social reconstruction the country so badly needs after the deformation it has suffered as a result of 35 years of being integrated into the U.S. military-industrial complex.

A fund to support the rehabilitation of the thousands of Egyptians (and others) tortured in the U.S.-supported prisons in Egypt run by U.S. (and Israeli) ally Omar Suleiman would be a fine place to start that project.

This is part of Quick Notes for a Quickly Changing World posted yesterday, H/T Arabist.

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**I heard on the radio this morning that big shots in the Egyptian military, which has been sucking the US "foreign aid" tit for several decades, have a variety of non-military business interests (manufacturing, imports, agriculture, etc.)  I would not be surprised if rich Egyptians have a Washington lobbyist or two among their expenses.