This Won't Go Down Well in Platteville

From the Globe and Mail:

ZURICH -- The United States launched a plan yesterday to slash farm subsidies and break a deadlock at WTO talks in time for a December deadline.

The U.S. proposal -- calling for a 60-per-cent cut in American subsidies and an 80-per-cent reduction by the European Union and Japan -- was welcomed as a move likely to boost the so-called Doha negotiations to open up trade through the World Trade Organization.

It's long overdue that we begin the slash-and-burn work of getting the land ready for unsubsidized farming. The threat has been that it will be the end of family farms and the rise of the corporate farming conglomeration, which will then lead to the secret quasi-government of global farm corporations, which will be the end of life on Earth as we know it.

Or not. It didn't sink the mom-and-pop accountants when H&R Block hit the scene - and diversified - and it hasn't prevented small, organic farmers (or even the non-organics) from thriving in an attempt to change the market by targeting health-food stores and farmer's markets across the country.

The WTO plans to cut its export farm subsidies by 2010, thus putting pressure on those producers and opening the door for the poorer farmers to be competitive in a non-artificial environment.

But don't expect it to happen with the stroke of a pen in a mountain hideaway somewhere in Europe. Baldwin, Feingold and the like didn't get where they are today without handing out a lot of farm dole. But scream as they might about the plight of the poor and the working class, it's the middle and upper tiers that will hurt by having to actually make their farms profitable, not the scrabblers.