The WTO commitments made by the United States are often cited as being an important constraint on the design of future U.S. farm programs. Many, however, are confused about the U.S. commitments and their future importance. In this paper, the authors attempt to fill this gap in understanding by...

The debate over a new farm bill has focused on how to spend an additional $73.5 billion in funding for the agricultural budget over 10 years. The House of Representatives, the Senate agriculture committee, and Senators Cochran and Roberts (supported by the Bush administration) have each proposed...

The United States Congress is currently devising the next farm bill. One of the many factors influencing the debate is the effect of trade agreements into which the United States has entered. Under the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Agriculture, government spending on trade-distorting...

Driven by the expanding production of biofuels, the linkage between the agricultural and energy markets is evolving, and that has changed the market for agricultural commodities dramatically. These developments in agricultural markets consequently shifted the distribution of domestic grains and...

Since 1986 the federal crop insurance program has changed in several ways: the number of covered crops has increased dramatically; the number of insured acres and amount of total premiums have risen; and new styles of crop insurance policies have been introduced. Each change has had a...

In 1996, two new crop insurance products--Crop Revenue Coverage and Income Protection--were introduced to insure against losses in revenue, as opposed to the traditional multiple-peril crop insurance that insures against crop yield losses. Using yield and price difference distributions in 1,000...

With the pending debate on the 1995 Farm Bill, crop insurance and disaster assistance have become major topics for discussion. This paper explores the performance of the current MPCI program and presents alternative programs. The need for a unified approach to ease the problem of agricultural...

This paper provides a critical overview of the most striking problems in the 1994 version of the U.S. crops model. No model is ever perfect; however, as agricultural policies change and more data become available, the model can be improved. As we enter the 1995 Farm Bill debate, it becomes...

This paper focuses on the third pillar of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the discipline of agricultural domestic support. The paper examines the current definition of agricultural domestic support used by the WTO, focusing on the...

This report is divided into two sections. The first part reports the statewide results for each of five surveyed groups: Iowa grain marketers, Iowa grain handlers, Iowa corn processors, Iowa soybean processors, and Iowa biodiesel producers. The state-level results provide a general idea of the...