In This Story
It’s a trade conflict you don’t often hear about, but the dispute between Brazil and the United States pitted two agricultural superpowers against each other over a vital and economically important commodity: cotton.
Mark S. Langevin, a Schar School of Policy and Government senior fellow and adjunct faculty member, applies his deep expertise in Brazil’s economy in a new book, The Political Economy of Brazil’s WTO Case Against the United States: Inside the Cotton Dispute (Springer Link), that looks at all sides of the issue.
“For many around the world, the cotton dispute reflected an existential struggle between David and Goliath, North and South, and certainly exposed the global competition between Brazil and the United States over agricultural commodity markets worldwide,” he said.
According to Langevin, the cotton dispute is a hallmark of Brazilian trade policy and diplomacy “and one of the most important conflicts treated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its Dispute Settlement Body (DSB).” As such, “this trade conflict attracted much attention during the first decade of the 21st century because it crystallized one of the essential structural inequalities expressed through the global capitalist economy, smashing the founding myth of the post-World War II international liberal order: that all global powers equally adhere to the rules of global governance.“
From the Brazilian perspective, the cotton dispute was a struggle to even the global playing field between the developed and developing world.
“For Brazilian and U.S. cotton producers, the trade dispute seemed inevitable given Brazil’s rapid agricultural modernization during the last decade of the 20th century. For everyone, the cotton dispute was a game changer,” Langevin said.