Agriculture Law Commons^™

In Defense Of, Or Offensive To Farms? Hog Farming And The Changing American Agricultural Industry, Shi-Ling Hsu

Shi-Ling Hsu

American agriculture is inexorably concentrating into the hands of a small number of large conglomerates. Expanding farms pursuing scale economies would also normally have to abide by a system of environmental and other laws that would, in theory, require farms to account for negative externalities. If those laws were observed and enforced, they would help strike a balance between the greater profitability and the larger externalities of larger farms. But these laws are not widely observed and not rigorously enforced, upsetting this balance and giving large-scale farms a cost advantage while insulating them from corresponding responsibilities.

Perhaps nowhere in agriculture …

Legitimacy, Accountability, And Partnership: A Model For Advocacy On Third World Environmental Issues, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

To date, there has been little effort to define the characteristics of responsible environmental reform efforts by private citizens and organizations in the United States on foreign environmental problems, such as the quality of foreign aid. Moreover, there have been virtually no attempts to identify a principled role for American lawyers in Third World environmental issues. This Essay will respond to these lacunae by articulating a new approach to advocacy based on a partnership model. In Part I, this Essay identifies the need for American public interest advocates to establish partnerships with directly affected groups on Third World environmental issues. …

The Cotton And Sugar Subsidies Decisions: Wto’S Dispute Settlement System Rebalances The Agreement On Agriculture, Stephen J. Powell, Andrew Schmitz

Stephen Joseph Powell

Acting on a complaint by Brazil, a WTO dispute settlement panel ruled September 8, 2004, that a variety of support programs for upland cotton exceeded reduction commitments made by the United States when it signed the 1995 WTO Agriculture Agreement and were thus not immune from challenge under the WTO Subsidies Agreement, with which the Panel then found these programs inconsistent.

The Panel's conclusions, if upheld by the WTO's Appellate Body, will have significant impact on agricultural policies for specialty and program crops of the United States, Europe, and Japan. This paper analyzes the decision, notable as the first to …