The agricultural trade confrontation between the United States and the European community: a challenge to our profession

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Several international agricultural commodity markets, particularly the most important in terms of total value of trade namely the wheat market, are largely shaped by the current 'subsidy war' between the United States and the European Community. The consequences ofthis trade war for producers, tax payers and consumers on the two sides of the Atlantic are obviously important. They are also very significant for economic actors in many other countries affected by these markets, be they net importers or exporters. In the short term, net importers benefit from the lower real, net prices resulting from this trade war. But in the long run the uncertainties of these markets are greatly enhanced by the US-EC confrontation. For many developing countries, these uncertainties are often presented as justifications for policies promoting a greater degree of food self-sufficiency. Thus the total cost of this trade confrontation is probably very high. One would thus expect that economic analyses of this confrontation could be very valuable. They should provide a better understanding of the issues and interests at stake, of the confrontation process itself, and hopefully ideas to reduce the confrontation and the associated uncertainties. Unfortunately, there are not many such objective analyses. Ideological positions shroud the issue and agricultural economists are too often blinded by their own, often implicit, perhaps unconscious, ideological biases. The purpose ofthis paper is to call attention to the responsibility of agricultural economists, as a profession, in such a situation. For this purpose it will be useful to characterize first the nature of the US-EC agricultural trade confrontation and then to draw two main consequences of the interpretation for our profession.