Under today's Hong Kong declaration, rich countries will end export subsidies on cotton next year.
Today, ministers agreed, in the meantime, to end farm export subsidies by the year 2013.
America has now put forward radical proposals for all countries to abolish agricultural export subsidies.
The WTO has rules against export subsidies for manufactured products, and interprets them broadly.
Export subsidies make taxpayers incur the higher costs for goods consumers would not otherwise have purchased.
On export subsidies, America lowered its ambition, giving up the goal of eliminating export subsidies altogether.
Removing export subsidies on agricultural products would raise the price of those products on world markets.
No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more NIH.
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In return for repealing our offending export subsidies, some in Congress want to give special subsidies to manufacturers.
But, in practice, few poor countries can emulate South Korea's self-disciplined use of discretionary quotas and export subsidies.
The passage promising to cut export subsidies, for example, could mean everything or nothing to a country like Brazil.
The WTO sees export subsidies as a particularly egregious breach of free-trade principles.
The World Trade Organization has ruled that our tax export subsidies--known as Foreign Sales Corporation and Extraterritorial Income Exclusion provisions--are illegal.
The 17 countries of the Cairns Group, which includes Australia, Brazil and Argentina, have campaigned long and hard against export subsidies.
Indian producers retort that Bangladesh's jute factories, just under half of which are owned by the state, benefit from unfair export subsidies.
Export subsidies in general tend to be regressive, since they take money from broad-based tax revenues and give it to corporate shareholders.
In the latest trade spat with China, America said it would impose tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels because of alleged export subsidies.
The problem is that the new bill provides for even bigger export subsidies than the old law: the subsidies are merely directed through different channels.
Over five years, the Americans propose to eliminate export subsidies for farm products, and to slash both tariffs on farm goods and trade-distorting subsidies for farmers.
Yet, so far, this is where the Doha talks have achieved the least (there has been more progress on cutting domestic support and eliminating export subsidies).
But a delegation that asked Brazil to end its export subsidies, overt or indirect (like the cheap maize that ends up as pork), got no joy.
Developing economies, for example, have a whole decade to cut the value of their export subsidies by 24% and the volume of subsidized exports by 14%.
The United States has moved to eliminate export subsidies, but under the farm bill which expires in 2007, the vast majority of payments to U.S. growers continue.
Canada has already won a case against Brazil in the World Trade Organisation, arguing that Brazil's export subsidies give Embraer's planes an unfair advantage in international markets.
America's proposal to abolish export subsidies came after the farm bill was signed and drew attention to the gap between what America says and what it actually does.
If farm prices were to tumble, both America and Europe might be loth to relinquish export subsidies, which in recent years have been kept down by firm markets.
The European Union also uses price supports and export subsidies.
Second, it prohibited new export subsidies and cut existing ones.
The focus on eliminating export subsidies, which are used far more by the Europeans than by America, obscures the fact that America's export credits and its food-aid programme distort global farm trade too.
Cheekily, perhaps, in view of its own farm bill, Washington has proposed the eventual abolition of all agricultural export subsidies and a limit on domestic farm subsidies of 5% of the value of total domestic production.
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