Making hay

Major analysis of the position of agriculture in the world.

Every crisis, it is said, is also an opportunity. But not, apparently, where farmers are involved. The leaders of international institutions including the World Bank and World Trade Organisation have exhorted governments to use the current food crisis to reform policies that distort agricultural production and trade. They argue that fewer subsidies and import tariffs would provide incentives for farmers around the world to increase production and exports.

Yet the effect has instead been to entrench farm lobbies in their existing positions, defending ever more fiercely the subsidies and tariff protection that they would now appear not to need.