USSEE 2017: Abstract Deadline Extended!

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1. To better support crop prices and protect the environment, Europe and the United States worked together for decades to create farm policies and agricultural trade policies that avoid encouraging land use and chemical. Economic research played an important role in this trade reform/environmental cooperation. Since the biofuel boom, tropical countries that experience the most rapid loss of forests and savannas now support agriculture, often on a scale with Europe and the United States. Their farm subsidies greatly increase deforestation and pollution from fertilizer. Preventing forest destruction could increase farm incomes by several billion dollars in the United States, alone. It is useful to identify where various subsidies are most damaging as well as potential remedies to the forest destruction and fertilizer pollution caused by farm subsidies in key tropical countries. Remedies may include changing payment schemes for farmers to so that payments do not directly encourage farm input use. This “decoupling” of payments increases economic efficiency of the trade system as well as benefiting farmers and the environment. Conservation compliance programs, such as those used in Brazil and the United States benefit the world’s farmers and provide even larger environmental leverage. Brazil’s compliance program for subsidized credit offers one of the most successful programs in the world for protecting forest ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gases. Potential gains from including tropical countries in trade reform efforts are very large because agricultural drivers of deforestation dwarf past incentives for saving forests, including payments for ecosystem services.