Matt Yglesias

Beer and Climate Change

Plzen, Czech Republic, home of fine beers (cc photo by Donald Judge)

Via Joshua Tucker, new research out of the Czech Republic indicates that climate change is bad for beer quality.

Which seems like as good a time as any to discuss the perversity of agriculturally-oriented Americans tendency to oppose climate change legislation. Generally speaking, when you see some stuff being grown somewhere that’s because the climate in that place is well-suited to growing the stuff that’s being grown. What’s more, the people doing the growing have an approach in place that’s well-suited to the intersection between the stuff being grown and the local climate. Climate change will, well, change all that. Some farmers might see a net benefit, but in general incumbent farmers are going to lose out since in general we have our farmland and farm infrastructure and farm-related human capital all located in places that make sense given the current climate.

Instead of seeing it that way, unfortunately, the tendency seems to be for rural America and agricultural interests to see the climate change debate primarily as a kind of culture war issue. Farm interests and environmentalists have had a lot of fights over the years about other things that’s given environmentalists and the environmental movement a bad image in those circles. Siding against them seems like the smart thing to do.

Unlikely Committee Scenarios

Sleepy Hollow Farm, Vermont (cc photo by snapstermax)

So far this year, Chris Dodd has been basically double-fisting as head of both HELP and Banking, but with Ted Kennedy now dead he needs to choose between them which sets off various musical chairs scenarios. My understanding is that he’ll almost certainly take the helm at HELP, since he wants to distance himself from some of his work on bank regulation and score a legacy-building win on health care. But if not:

If Dodd doesn’t leave Banking, then HELP would go to Iowa’s Tom Harkin, who would have to give up his post as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee to take it. The next most senior members of the Ag Committee are Leahy, Conrad and Baucus, all of whom chair more important committees. So Ag would probably go to Blanche Lincoln. If Harkin stays put — and he is an Iowan, so chairing Ag is worth something to him — then HELP would go to Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski.

Not only will Dodd probably leave Banking, if he did choose to stay Harkin would almost certainly not give up Agriculture. And even if Harkin did give up Agriculture, Leahy probably wouldn’t give up Judiciary. But in the unlikely event that all this did happen and Pat Leahy became chair of the Agriculture Committee, the results would be potentially hilarious. After all, we’re used to agriculture policy being completely dominated by the interests of the big midwestern corn producers. But what if we instead redirected all that money into massive subsidies for maple syrup and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? The public health consequences could be dire. At the same time, I believe Vermont is a major center of artisanal cheese production and the results of more subsidies for that could be delicious.

Part of the larger moral of the story here is that one of the perverse aspects of the committee system is that it encourages progressive politicians to maximize their power on the issues where they take the least-progressive stands. I agree with Tom Harkin about almost everything except agricultural policy. And Chris Dodd has a much better record on all the issues that aren’t financial institution regulation than on the issue he has the most power over. If you just reassigned everyone at random, you’d probably improve outcomes.

Collin Peterson’s Short-Term View of Agricultural Interests

Those of us who are interested in climate change but not congressional procedure junkies have been surprised to learn that comprehensive energy legislation apparently needs to make its way through the House Agriculture Committee. And those of us who aren’t House Ag junkies have been surprised to learn that the Chairman of the Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, is apparently quite conservative on environmental issues. Consequently, he’s emerged as a major impediment to action. And also as the kind of guy who doesn’t seem to even understand what climate change is:

We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn.

Sadly, he’s not joking about this. Back in the real-world, farmers in any given place have worked over the years to achieve a setup that’s well-suited to the climate they face. If you drastically change the climate, that’s a big problem. What’s more, as Brad Johnson points out “global warming brings not only warmer temperatures but also heavier floods.” What’s more, a recent NOAA report concluded that “even moderate increases in temperature will decrease yields of corn, wheat, sorghum, bean rice, cotton, and peanut crops.”

The agriculture system is heavily implicated in our current, unsustainable climate trajectory. Consequently, adjustment may be painful for practitioners of industrial agriculture and for communities that depend on it. But simply pretending that the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t make the problem go away. Agriculture is also heavily exposed to the potentially devastating impact of climate change. Farmers and farm communities are being done no real favors by Peterson’s attitude.

Swine Flu and Industrial Agriculture

There’s been a great uptick in interest over the past couple of years in the environmental and ethical problems with the ways animals are conventionally raised in modern industrial agriculture settings. That, combined with the rise of swine flu, has naturally led to interest in the issue of whether or not the emergence and spread of the H1N1 virus is linked to pig Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in some damning way. Grist is hosting an interesting debate on the subject, with Tom Philpott making the case for links and Merritt Clifton pushing back and saying the evidence really isn’t in.

I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the general issue of animal-to-human flu strain “jumps” is that it is related to agriculture, but not necessarily to the CAFO question. The reason these transmission cases typical involve chickens (”avian flu”) or pigs (”swine flu”) is that these are the animals most commonly raised by man. And chicken and pig viruses are subject to animal-to-human transmission in part because it’s common for people and their animals to be living in extremely close quarters in the developed world. It’s true that strict adherence to humane treatment of free range animals would mitigate that risk. But the locus of the problem is less the state-of-the-art developed world CAFOs than it is developing world agricultural practices.

That’s in general. Of course in general these things also usually happen in Asia, where those practices are widespread. Since this particular flu arose in Mexico, where conditions are different, it’s not unreasonable to think that the circumstances of origin are different.

Public Opinion and Farm Subsidies

By Matthew Yglesias

Tom Laskaway revisits a little discussion we had a while back (me, him, me) about public opinion and agricultural subsidies, with help from a more detailed survey from World Public Opinion. Turns out that Americans have communitarian ideas about this that aren’t well reflected in current policy. Voters say subsidies for large agribusiness firms (basically the only kind we give out) should go:

But they strongly support the idea of subsidies for small farmers:

For what it’s worth, in my role as someone who likes tasty food I’m certainly not averse to heading down to the farmer’s market to buy some tasty items from a local small-scale farm. But when it comes to the public policy issues, I’m pretty dubious that all the different virtues come together so tightly. If we’re talking about redirecting farm subsidies, I think it’s much more important to focus on what activities we’re subsidizing than on what scale of enterprises we’re subsidizing. The important thing would be to try to make subsidies promote public health and environmental goals. But if someone finds a business model that involves doing that on a very large scale, I don’t see a compelling reason to discourage him.

Back to the Land in Japan

Hiroko Tabuchi has an interesting article in the New York Times about an element of Japan’s economic recovery program that aimed at getting unemployed young people to go work on farms. Low-immigration Japan, after all, winds up with a shortfall of agricultural workers even while the recession creates large-scale unemployment in metropolitan areas.

Of course one can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter instead to try to tackle some of the structural issues in this area. Like all developed countries, Japan has agricultural protection policies that don’t make much economic sense. But my understanding is that Japan is the outlier in terms of going further than the United States or Europe does to try to prop up an agricultural sector that’s ill-suited to today’s realities. The ability of a structural labor shortage to coincide with high levels of unemployment seems to me to mostly just illustrate the point that the distortions involved in this make the Japanese economy less resilient than it otherwise might be.

Ag Subsidies Revisited

I observed yesterday that even though agriculture subsidies are typically discussed as a canonical example of special interests controlling the political process, proposals to curtail the subsidies don’t actually poll very well suggesting a broader political problem. Tom Laskaway responds that the question was worded very generically and people probably don’t understand what’s actually being subsidized.

That’s probably true, but the public rarely has a particularly nuanced discussion of the issues they’re asking poll questions about. My only point was that this issue is often discussed among high-information people as if a politician who ran around the country saying “I’m going to cut agriculture subsidies!” would be greeted with widespread applause, albeit defeated by special interest politics in the Senate. The available evidence, though somewhat meager, suggests that this may not actually be the case. Instead, the farm lobby has its teeth not only in the congress but into the brains of the public, who seem to understand “farm subsidies” to mean something wholesome and good rather than endless rivers of corn and soybeans being transformed into processed foods at enormous cost to the environment and public health.

The Surprising Popularity of Farm Subsidies

Well-known bigot Steven Walt offers up another one of his tawdry conspiracy theories in which U.S. policy is the result of special interest lobbying:

Like other industrial countries, the United States subsidizes a host of agricultural products and erects various trade barriers against foreign imports. This happens because the farm lobby is defending the narrow interests of the farm sector and many democratic systems give small groups (in this case farmers or agribusiness) disproportionate influence. (It’s the usual story: A small group reaps the benefits of this policy while the costs are dispersed across the whole population). This policy makes food more expensive, encourages farmers to grow the wrong crops, squanders energy, and hinders economic development in poorer countries, thereby contributing to political instability. These policies also make it much harder to negotiate multilateral trade deals that would raise prosperity world-wide. So although nearly every detached observer thinks the policy is wrong, they also know that the political power of farm interests (both here and abroad) makes it excruciatingly difficult to change course.

No, actually, this is just what everyone thinks and not a conspiracy theory at all. Indeed, “everyone” thinks it to such an overwhelming extent that we may be overlooking the extent to which lots of people think terrible agriculture policy is actually a good idea. Here’s a recent Pew poll on various aspects of Barack Obama’s budget, a document which, among other things, proposes slicing agricultural benefits:

On the issue of reducing agricultural subsidies, more Republicans say it is the wrong thing than the right thing (57% vs. 34%), while Democrats and independents are more evenly divided.

It would be interesting to know the exact wording of the question here, which unfortunately I can’t find. Still, it seems to indicate that this is a bit more than a question of a narrow group blocking change. What may be happening is that since farm subsidies have passionate defenders in both parties, a wide swathe of people are accustomed to seeing them endorsed by leaders they trust.

Orszag: “No One Should Be Surprised” By Administration Ag Subsidy Proposals

An important quirk of the budget process is known as “congress.” The President isn’t a Prime Minister who can outline a budget and then commit the country to sticking to it. He can outline a budget and then do his best to get congress to pass legislation that conforms to the budget. Consequently, you wind up with a mix of predictions (GDP will be such-and-such leading to such-and-such tax revenues), policy reaches (the cap & trade proposal), and proposals that I think are best characterized as wishful thinking. The Obama administration’s proposal to curtail farm subsidies for the wealthiest farmers most likely fits into the latter category. I asked OMB Director Peter Orszag if he thought that their projections on that score were realistic given the politics of the situation and he responded in a very upbeat and confident manner that the president “was very clear” about his desire to do this on the campaign trail, and so “no one should be surprised” to see the proposal in the budget. Which is true, but a long way from saying that the administration has been putting its shoulder to the wheel to try to find some way to see this initiative through congress.

Meanwhile, the key legislative players are predictably uninterested in changing things:

“We’ll have to see what specifically the president is talking about, but we just finished the farm bill last year, and I don’t think we’ll open it up,” said Rep. Collin C. Peterson, Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

Likewise, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said the farm bill, which lasts for five years, “should not be changed midstream.”

“I believe it is premature to make any sweeping changes to the makeup of the farm safety net before we have even had the chance to implement the current farm bill,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.

It’s remarkable how even a hard-bitten rightwinger like Senator Chamblisss can suddenly see the virtues of a safety net when the beneficiaries are well-to-do agricultural firms. A Christmas miracle, you might say, except that the magic of interest-group politics works 12 months a year. Still, if there are any Republicans out there who are both interested in curtailing domestic discretionary spending and in bipartisan cooperation, it might be smart to try to take this up and make the White House try to live up to its own promises of bipartisanship as well as its budget commitments. The prospects for reform of this sort of thing are never good, but the farm bill written in the Gingrich-Clinton era was substantially less bad than the more recent versions have been, so these things are possible to some extent.

Exclusive

I like Michael Pollan’s books a lot. And it’s good that you’re hearing more discussion of agriculture and nutrition policy. But a lot of Pollan’s forays into this area seem to mostly reveal a lack of understanding of how the political process works. For example, this idea:

Make the House agriculture committee exclusive. The most important committees in the House — Energy, Finance, etc. — are “exclusive,” which means their membership has to be drawn from diverse geographical and ideological sources. Ag isn’t exclusive, which means it can be (and is) packed with representatives of Big Ag. It’s where decent ag legislation goes to die.

Ezra Klein observes that it would actually do the reverse. If House Ag were exclusive, then only members representing farm interests could ever possibly afford to give up the chance to sit on other committees for the sake of a seat on the Agriculture Committee.

Department of Good Ideas

Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.

That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.

Methane

Njbunk asks:

How about a post on the effect of methane emissions on global warming? Cows probably contribute as much, maybe more, to global warming as cars. If we’re going to tax carbon emitters, we should tax methane emitters (cows) as well.

I’m not a scientist, or a cow fart expert, but my understanding is that when you see a high estimate of a cow’s contribution to global warming you’re looking at a very broad estimate of the cow’s climactic footprint. Which is to say not just his methane emissions, but the considerable amount of carbon expended in growing and transporting the grain on which he feeds. But, yes, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas because of the large quantity of emissions but it’s not actually the most pernicious on a per unit level and the case for regulating carbon emissions applies just as well to methane emissions and a few other things. There are obviously some technical issues here that I’m not conversant with, and I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary for me to become conversant with them in order to do the kind of persuasive work I’m trying to do with this blog, but you would want congress and the EPA to look at this sort of thing carefully.

The flipside of this is that one of the under-discussed social consequences of improved environmental policy would almost certainly be a large change in Americans’ beef-consumption behaviors. The difference between eating beef and eating chicken or pork in terms of climate footprint is enormous. If those climactic externalities were priced into the beef, you’d see a lot less beef eaten overall and probably a resurgence of interest in the cheaper/grosser parts of the cow.

The Tragedy of Agriculture

I was watching a Tivoed episode of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” yesterday and, before talking about how to cook crown roast of lamb he offered some general thoughts on the lamb. In the course of doing so, he mentioned that man had shifted to ranching and farming as an alternative to hunting for food because hunting was time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is commonly believed and seems to be common sense, but it’s actually mistaken. The transition to agriculture was, to the best of our knowledge, associated with a catastrophic drop in living standards — longer hours of work, worse health, and less happiness.

Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread.

Farmer-in-Chief

Grist’s Tom Philpot writes:

People in the sustainable-ag world — including me — are having a tough time time accepting that Obama has picked an a ethanol-loving, GMO enthusiast as his USDA chief.

But then again, Obama himself is a strong supporter of both GMOs and ethanol, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised.

I think the second sentiment here is the more correct one. During the campaign, Obama promised bold progressive change on a number of fronts. Agricultural policy was not one of them. And on those issues where Obama jousted with John McCain — namely subsidies for corn ethanol and tarrifs on Brazilian sugar ethanol — Obama tended to be on the wrong side of the issue. Vilsack, meanwhile, is no kind of hero of the farm reform movement but the positions he’s staked out are arguably better than Obama’s. He’s said we should drop the sugar ethanol tax and he’s talked about the need to reform the school lunch system. That’s not a great agenda, but it’s not a “disappointing” one either, it’s more farm reform than Obama ever promised.

The Farm Exception

I didn’t know a great deal about Ken Salazar’s environmental record, but according to Grist’s Kate Sheppard he’s been quite solid on most “green” issues with the important exception of agriculture where he’s done things like vote against “a subsidy-reform amendment to the farm bill that would have boosted conservation funding by $1.2 billion and made access to the funds more equitable.” And the shocking reality of the legislative politics of agriculture is that the amendment in question failed by a large margin.

Meanwhile, Tom Vilsack is going to be Agriculture Secretary. Vilsack did some very important yeoman’s work a few years back trying to heal the wounds between the labor-oriented and centrist factions of the progressive movement, but on farm issues as far as anyone knows he’s a very conventional Iowa subsidy guy. Given the Obama administration’s high environmental aspirations, it seems perverse to just pretend that agricultural policy doesn’t have environmental impact. But that’s the convention in American politics and it looks like something Team Obama is comfortable with.

The Food Committee

The United States could urgently use food policy reform. Right now, we have a lot of subsidies to food growers. That’s questionable economics. But what’s more, we subsidize people to grow food that’s bad for public healthy in ways that are environmentally unsound. That’s terrible. If we’re going to subsidize farming, we ought to be subsidizing people for growing healthy crops in a sustainable way. On the merits, this is a no-brainer — there’s obviously no public interest in taxpayer subsidies for high-fructose corn syrup — but the politics is another matter.

Nicholas Kristof did a column on this subject the other day that used as a framing device the idea that it should be called the Department of Food rather than the Department of Agriculture. The idea is that this reenforces the point that public policy should serve people who eat food (everyone!) rather than companies that grow and process food. As far as framing devices go, that’s a fine one. But the focus on the Department of Agriculture sort of obscures where the real action is: Congress. A president only gets to set a few priorities. In principle, agricultural policy could be a presidential priority. But it’s clear that it’s not on Barack Obama’s top five list and it hasn’t been on any president’s top priorities list for a very long time. That’s the way of the world. By contrast, ag policy is always the top priority of the House of Senate Agriculture committees. That’s what they’re there for. The route to improved policy runs through these committees so whatever clever ideas people have, that would be the place to look.

Meanwhile, Kristof writes:

But let’s be clear. The problem isn’t farmers. It’s the farm lobby — hijacked by industrial operators — and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.

I grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Ore., where my family grew cherries and timber and raised sheep and, at times, small numbers of cattle, hogs and geese. One of my regrets is that my kids don’t have the chance to grow up on a farm as well.

Yet the Agriculture Department doesn’t support rural towns like Yamhill; it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.

I’m not going to lie to you and say I’ve read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I can say in good conscience that I read about half of it in Finland and Pollan makes a similar case. Kristof also quotes him in his column, so I think they’re on the same page about this.

But while there’s truth in what they’re saying, there are also some limits. It’s true that status quo farm policy is bad for many farmers. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves here. The Senate Agriculture Committee is chaired by Tom Harken. He’s a good guy and a good senator. But he’s also from Iowa. And though status quo ag policy may be bad for small towns in Oregon, trying to massively switch consumption in favor of fresh, seasonal, local produced food would be a disaster for farmers in Iowa. An Iowa farmer just isn’t “local” to very many people — the Iowa farm economy intrinsically relies on the existence of a big national and international market. California, by contrast, has both good farmland and metro areas full of people who could be buying locally produced food.

All Tomorrow’s Corn Cars

Joe Romm observes that GM’s plan for recovery (PDF) involves terrible energy and environmental policy:

General Motors is also the world leader in flex fuel technologies, with over 3 million flex fuel-equipped vehicles on U.S. roads today. Flex fuels represent the fastest way for the United States to reduce its dependence on imported oil.

As Romm says: “Uhh, no. Corn ethanol remains the worst energy policy idea of the past two decades with very limited potential to replace significantly more imported oil. Meanwhile, scalable, affordable cellulosic ethanol is not right around the corner.”

There’s something to the logic that if AIG is going to benefit from a horribly misimplemented bailout, and Citigroup is going to get a sweetheart deal, and corn farmers everywhere are going to benefit from ludicrous subsidies, that there’s no reason to arbitrarily exclude General Motors from the “giveaways to politically connected companies” bonanza. Especially considering that as we slide into recession, the liquidation of GM would be a big anti-stimulus. But still, I don’t think Jon Cohn people should labor under the illusion that these firms have “seen the light” in any serious way. And all that is before you consider that I’m not hearing any of these executives promising to back off their constant, furious lobbying for planet-and-economy destroying environment and infrastructure policies.

Nixon Goes to Farm Subsidies

I wouldn’t be nearly so quick as Ezra Klein to dismiss the possibility that a farm belt politician like Tom Vilsack could be a good choice to lead a charge for beneficial farm policy reform. Ezra says:

The Nixon-to-China analogy does not hold much water. Nixon could go to China because, unlike a Democrat, he couldn’t be painted as weak, and so the political system couldn’t muster effective opposition to his resumption of diplomatic relations. But for the corn lobby to paint an administration as anti-subsidy, all they have to do is effectively argue that the administration is opposing corn subsidies. Which is either happening or it isn’t.

As I see it, the structure of the US Congress (and especially the Senate) clearly makes it impossible to ever eliminate or even meaningfully reduce the volume of subsidies currently being directed to subsidized parts of the country. To improve policy, what you’d need to do is radically change the nature of the subsidy scheme, so that essentially the same amount of money (or perhaps slightly more) was going to essentially the same areas, but the activities being subsidized had beneficial effects rather than pernicious ones. You could, for example, subsidize the growing of healthy food and and sound environmental stewardship. In Switzerland they offer absurdly large subsidies to cows ($15,000 per cow I’ve been told) but what’s being encouraged a picturesque hillside pastures. It’s hardly ideal policy, but it’s better than subsidized CAFOs.

The trick is that even if you could design a subsidy scheme that was better for the environment and better for public health than the status quo (indeed, I recall Tom Harkin musing about this in a conversation with me and maybe a dozen other bloggers at the 2004 convention), but just as beneficial to Iowa, it would still be bad for some specific interests who would try to convince Iowans in general that what was on offer was a bad deal for everyone. To persuade them otherwise, you’d need a politician who’s trusted in farming areas. You’d need, in other words, a Vilsack.

Now that said, the only indication Obama’s ever given of having a secret plan to unveil a politically risky overhaul of farm policy is a single offhand remark about Michael Pollan in one interview. He’s released detailed proposals for large reforms of a number of policy areas, and this isn’t one of them. And his pro-ethanol record is clear. So I don’t see any particular reason to be optimistic about the short-term prospects for reform. But if reform is ever going to happen, it’s going to come through close collaboration with enlightened farm belt politicians, not by freezing them out of the process.

Trade as the Decider

To bolster what Ryan Avent is saying here, I don’t care how much of a free trader you are, it’d be bizarre to make trade policy the decisive factor in your presidential preference this year. It’s clear enough that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is going to somehow repeal NAFTA or undo the WTO. Meanwhile, it’s also clear enough that neither Obama nor McCain is going to get the new congress to agree to any major new trade agreements. Beyond that, the collapse of the Doha Round makes it seem like even a president very eager to sign new trade agreements would have difficulty coming up with any new ones to sign.

Trade is an interesting subject, but it just not a policy area likely to shift a great deal over the next few years no matter who wins. The most important trade-related thing we could do at this point has to do with agriculture, but structural issues in American politics that have nothing to do with the identity of the President make it very unlikely that anything will change. If you really care about moving the ball forward, trade-wise, what’s needed is some smart ideas about practical approaches to farm policy reform.