The Hill News

The federal budgetary squeeze on agricultural subsidies offers the President and Congress a beckoning opportunity to seize and shape a grand global bargain on international trade. We could trade new cuts in farm subsidies for new markets to create new jobs in other sectors of trade.

Doing so could end the decade-long deadlock in the Doha Development Round of global trade negotiations. Those negotiations linger on life support, with hundreds of billions of dollars in increased trade annually -- and untold new jobs -- at risk if they fail.

The stubborn refusal of the United States to make additional cuts in our agricultural subsidies is by far the biggest obstacle to a global trade breakthrough. Our trading partners are willing to give us more of what we want than they have offered so far -- but only if we give them more of what they want. What they want most are cuts in the U.S. farm subsidies that keep their highly competitive farm products out of the U! .S. market and distort markets worldwide.

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