Billions Go To “Farmers” Who Don’t Farm
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Money, Social ProgramsThe title says it all.
Key sentence:
The payments now account for nearly half of the nation’s expanding agricultural subsidy system, a complex web that has little basis in fairness or efficiency.
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July 3rd, 2006 at 8:47 am
I’ve been wondering for ages why those billions aren’t going entirely towards mandating that the “leftover” farmers produce crops suitable for use in alternative fuel sources.
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:24 pm
No more mysterious than the fact that most of the money “for the preservation of the family farms” goes to corporate farms (in addition to these non-farms). Subsidies may (well sometimes) start as an effort to do something worthwhile; but they end up being ends in themselves.
July 5th, 2006 at 10:27 am
I would guess that there’s one legitimate argument for this: the government spends less money to keep those fields unused than the economy would suffer in damage if those fields were to produce enough food to drive down worldwide food prices to the point that many farms would simply go bankrupt – including some family farms.
In any case, my understanding is that this has been going on for decades. It’s not exactly news, though it is worth reporting on every so often.
July 5th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Except, of course, that if the government was not spending money to hold up prices in the US, prices worldwide would go UP — because people in poor countries would not have to compete with subsidized American farmers. If the world were on the brink of famine due to insufficient agricultural capacity, then you would have a point (albeit a different one) about negative imacts of American subsidies going away.
But at the moment, the main impact would be improved living standards around the world — and at a far lower cost than what we spend on foreign aid trying to improve things. And if the EU and Japan also dropped their farm subsidies at the same time, the global economy would really zoom! In fact, that’s what the Doha Round of trade talks is trying for; and were it is hung up.