They don’t distort trade.
Hopewell 19 [Kristen, Kristen Hopewell is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, “US-China conflict in global trade governance: the new politics of agricultural subsidies at the WTO.”, Review of International Political Economy, (), 1–25. doi:10.1080/09692290.2018.1560352, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09692290.2018.1560352]* graph omitted <Jericho>
Ironically, the US – long seen as the villain in this area – has increasingly come to view itself as a victim of China’s agricultural subsidies. The level of support the US provides to its agricultural producers has been consistently below the OECD average and falling over time (OECD, 2017). Since the Uruguay Round, and the Brazil cotton dispute, the US has reformed its own farm programs, shifting towards less trade-distorting forms of support. The US’s producer support declined from 21% of gross farm receipts in 1986–88 to 9% in 2014–16, with the proportion provided in the most trade-distorting forms of support falling from 51% to 33% (OECD, 2017). Yet now, the US finds its chief market and competitor, China, moving in the opposite direction. Today, as one negotiator stated, China is ‘comprehensively outspending them in a way the US can’t respond to because of its fiscal limitations and its WTO limits on production-linked spending’. 3 From the US’s perspective, to quote one of its former negotiators, not only are China’s subsidies ‘distorting world markets but they have become significantly more trade-distorting than subsidies in developed countries’ and ‘the US, as the biggest agricultural exporter, suffers most from these distortions’. 4