June 16, 2011 4:02PM # Good News on Cotton By [Sallie James](https://www.cato.org/people/sallie-james) --- SHARE We’re another step closer to putting a shameful chapter of America’s trade policy behind us, with the good news that the House today approved (by a margin of 223–197, roll call [here](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll439.xml)) an amendment offered by Rep. Ron Kind (D‑WI) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R‑AZ) to prohibit the use of funds in the appropriations bill to provide payment to the Brazil Cotton Institute: the administration signed a deal last year with Brazil to send $147 million a year of taxpayers money to Brazil so they would look the other way while the United States continued to subsidize our cotton farmers [illegally](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6816). Mr Kind and Mr Flake rightly argued that was an egregious use of taxpayer money. Some lawmakers agitated against stopping the payments in case it sparked a trade war, but the answer to that, of course, is to bring U.S. cotton policy into compliance with WTO rules (and rulings). More background[ here](https://www.cato.org/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-shameful-u-s-cotton-deal/). ##### Related Tags [Trade Policy](https://www.cato.org/trade-policy), [Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies](https://www.cato.org/herbert-stiefel-center-trade-policy-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).