Hall of Shame: US pays off Brazil to keep Cotton Subsidies

Krzysztof J. Pelc has a post in the Monkey Cage about the deal between the US and Brazil in which the US pays Brazil $300 million to settle Brazil's complaint about US cotton subsidies which Brazil claims depresses the world price of cotton.

Such payoffs are explicitly against the WTO's rules but there is little  he WTO can do about it. As Pelc explains:

The key to understanding this outcome is to know that the WTO relies on a decentralized enforcement system. There is no WTO public prosecutor or WTO attorney general: No violation is challenged unless another member state files a formal complaint. And while this is meant to reassure states wary of ceding too much sovereignty to the institution, it also means that the system is ripe for collusion. In this case, the United States only had to satisfy Brazil to make the case go away — for a while.