I couldn’t think of a pun about the UN and global trade

 During the past unit, we visited a coffee bean roastery and learned about the darker sides to food production. The action project assignment was to deliver a speech about a specific target of SDG 2, and I jumped at the chance to finally use my 48 star US flag with something. Anyway, here’s the video with the transcript below.   

"The responsibility of the great states is to protect, not to dominate, the world.”

- Harry S. Truman

The sdgs are UN set targets for a better society, like eliminating poverty and hunger and making all children have a school to go to. I chose target 2b which is ending export subsidies, which are exports that are monetarily supported by the government they are sent from to artificially lower their prices to undercut local businesses. because I didn’t know about export subsidies before this, and it aligns to my interests. My solution to the export subsidy problem is to stop or severely lessen export subsidies so rich nations stop strangling domestic markets of poor nations.

So the UN thinks that export subsidies are bad, and they want to stop them. The UN has identified this as a global priority because export subsidies make small nations dependent on larger ones which promotes neocolonialism, can starve nations that go against large rich neighbor’s wishes, and if a famine of this exported resource hits the exporting nation, the effects are deadlier.

Compared to other food related issues, export subsidies are a relatively new thing, the earliest I found being in 1933, 87 years ago in the United States of america. The agricultural adjustment act stated that wheat and cotton exports would be subsidized in order to drag in more profits.

“Section 32 of P.L. 320, the Act of August 24, 1935, provided authority for subsidy payments to be made to assist exports of specified U.S. surplus commodities such as wheat and cotton.”

From history, we have learned that export subsidies don't really help to improve an economy when it’s already facing a shortage. The 1935 agricultural adjustment act was eventually ruled unconstitutional and replaced by one without subsidies in 1938. We can learn from this by instead only subsidizing local markets in short term shortages, and using the leftover money to prevent shortages from happening again.

Instead of subsidizing our own exports, we should use that money to help pay for better equipment and farming in local markets so smaller nations stay independent and the USA looks a little better, especially in this time of crisis when we are trying to take a moral high ground.

In conclusion, unless you’re selling to a nation without domestic markets, export subsidies have to go. Export subsidies are almost always imperialist, they keep small nations down, and large ones on top. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act#Ruled_unconstitutional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act_of_1938 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/40862/54240_aer766c.pdf?v=0 https://www.heritage.org/trade/commentary/lessons-free-trade-the-great-depression https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105sdoc24/html/ch4.html https://www.thebalance.com/farm-subsidies-4173885