The WTO’s decision to end agricultural export subsidies is good news for farmers and consumers (Heinz Strubenhoff, Brookings)

When I started to work in development cooperation in the late 1980s, one-third of EU agricultural subsidies—about 10 billion euros annually (equivalent to about 17 billion euros today)—were spent on export subsidies. The EU Common Agricultural Policy was a central planning system with administratively fixed intervention prices for major commodities, huge stocks of cereals and milk products, and high import tariffs. It felt like the West’s imitation of Soviet-style central planning. Paradoxically, despite a sharp increase in subsidies, farmers kept complaining. The main reason being that the EU intervention agencies largely deprived farmers of their rights to work as real entrepreneurs in free markets.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/future-development/posts/2016/02/08-wto-agriculture-export-subsidies-strubenhoff