have to get back to you on this. off the top of my head though this last year has been rather unpleasant for the beef industry which has received considerable support and this may well have distorted the %. there was again a fair bit of flooding which has resulted in crop insurance payments etc. this is just cursory though. i'll have a look at the pdf and their methodology. 20% seems pretty high but my background would be grain/beef and other sectors may get a better deal.

Ehran, if Canada was working off a low base maybe there is some justification for your argument, but Canada is not. Added to that, from the Australian perspective, we are just starting to come out of three years of drought, the worst drought in a century. If anyone had a basis to argue for an increase in income support we would. Our governemtn has staedfastly argued that we cannot go down the slippery sloe of farm income support, and has copped a lot of flak for that approach. It seems the Cnadian government has not been equally principled. Look at the levels of support given, give me a fair explanation as to how these levels can be justified, in the light of what you have been saying about American practices.

something about the pdf keeps crashing my browser so i've had to send it home to read.

had a look and i think at least part of the problem is that they seem to consider the marketing board setup here in canada as a system of farm price supports which i don't really think it is. essentially the marketing boards cover milk for sure in most urban areas. the marketing board regulates the amount of milk produced to ensure an adequate supply without going through the boom/bust cycles of production. it is strictly an internal bit of business with negligible effect on exports which is why i am not at all sure it should be included in the calculations. aside from that i was surprised by how much "support" there is from the various levels of gov't in canada. my contacts in the beef/grain farming business certainly don't seem to be getting a lot in the way of support so i have to wonder just what sectors are soaking up the money.

Not quite sure what your'e saying here. The source of information for OECD report is the home governments, subject to sceptical review. Ehran, give me something to work with here. You have spent a lot of time on this site (on various threads) giving buggery to the Americans. This report confirms that Canada is in there doing precisely the same things you accuse the Americans of. If you want to dispute the findings you have to do better than you have. Let me add, you have been very active over the last couple of days on a number of other threads. At the same time you have been pretty inactive on this one. It is time for you to square up. I look forward to a clear explanation as to how Canada is better than those "despised" Americans. to put it more plainly, this report reinforces the complaints of a lot of Australian farmers that they are getting it in the neck from Canadian producers. Tell me why they are wrong.

well you could look at the number of trade complaints filed under nafta as a barometer of how the american trade practises work. the majority of complaints are filed by canada against the us. the majority of complaints filed are decided in canada's favour as are the wto rulings so far. this would indicate the virtue in trade matters generally lies north of the border. i have no idea what's going on in australia in the farming business or how canadian producers would be giving it to the aussies in the neck. can you provide me with some background on what's going on? had problems looking at the pdf on the dinoputer i use at work. something in it kept crashing the browser and oft times the computer itself. as i said i am not at all sure the marketing boards here for milk etc should be counted as supports since their effects are as far as i can see strictly internal with minimal effects on international trade. if these numbers were to be taken out of play the support % would drop appreciably. if you want to look at the effects of trade policy around the world you pretty much have to look at the us and the eu as being the "bad" guys. no one else comes close to what those two manage to do. it's not so much deliberately setting out to do bad things to little countries they are just collateral damage along the way. you should read up on cotton sometime it's really an eyeopener.

So what you are saying is that since Canada b!tches more and has a better image at the WTO that you are better...

works more like this. we have more cause to bitch based on the relative numbers of complaints filed. we have more cause to bitch based on the relative number of wins/losses in the complaints with judgements rendered. as for looking better at the WTO i think that has less to do with us than US behaviour on the trade front by and large.

Pseudonym's last post RE: the WTO rulings made me think: Something I have noticed relatively recently about the US (though I imagine this goes back a ways) is that people there often don't understand that other countries have negative opinions about the US for a reason. To elaborate: The US has done amazing things for other countries in the past, and as a result had a lot of positive PR. World war two comes to mind immediately. People in the US tend to say "ah hah! we did this great thing and now people think better of us.", which is as it should be. They do not tend to say "This country that used to think highly of us no longer does. This must be because we did something to bother them." In a nutshell, they claim responsibility for the good but not the bad. I guess that's just the human condition in general, it's much easier to bask in the glory of a good deed but a lot harder to own up to botching something up, whether you meant to or not.

Read closely about the implacation of the Agricultural subsidies, the French, the Iraq war, and more. I think this article is pointing out how some of the subsidies were used by the French as a tool to fight the United States with. There is always more to a subject than right or wrong when it involves politics. Action and reaction. Who knows where it started or when, but trade agreements have been used for political fights for a long time. http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/ftaa/671.html http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20030614