AGRICULTURE has been one of the major stumbling blocks to establishment of reasonable world trade policies and expansion of world trade for decades. Since World War II, agricultural leaders and their politician co-dependents in developed countries like the U.S., France, Japan, South Korea, and even Canada, have taken stances that were inimical to freer global trade. Those stances have gradually been imitated by emerging giants like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Agriculture's protectionist stance has brought great waste of public resources in many countries, led to misdirection of scarce capital, and given youth misleading signals on career choices. Innovation has been diverted from making farms and agribusinesses more productive and profitable to mining government programs.
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